Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
The Lord God Bird
Condemned by Hubris and Greed
Resurrected in an Arkansas Swamp
April 28, 2005
Declared Forever Gone—Again
September 30, 2021
Even a Divine Name Could Not Save You

IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, a bird with an obsidian black body, ebony dark as a night sky; an almost iridescent star-burnt plumage emboldened by a bolt of white lightning running from mouth to tail, and a similar bolt charging the wings’ trailing edges. It is a rather large bird, not ostrich gargantuan or even wild turkey–size, but bigger than any such forest-lurking, flying bird you’ve ever seen. It hangs on the side of an enormous tree, perhaps an ancient hackberry or a bald cypress. Seeming to defy gravity, the bird hitches itself up the tree, its avian eye—an eye that could’ve belonged to a velociraptor but is now on a distant cousin bird—stares wildly into the past as if remembering its reptilian lineage. As striking as every inch of this bird is, it has one especially jaw-dropping feature: an outrageously oversize beak, larger than any other living woodpecker—other than its Mexican cousin, the imperial woodpecker, also likely extinct—glowing like the tusks of the mighty mastodon with which it shared the Pleistocene. This bird is so spectacular that it transcends geologic time. Its proportions test credulity. Question is, did you really see what you think you saw, or has your mind been tricked into believing what might possibly be?

What would you say if you saw such a being? Would you cry out, “Oh my God, what a bird!” Or maybe, in my case, “Good Lord! What the fuck was that?” The alleged exclamation from some early birdwatcher was, “Lord God, what a bird!”—a cry that was eventually shortened to the nickname “Lord God Bird.” Maybe they called out to heaven for some explanation of how such a creature came to be, or maybe this was the only exclamation worthy of what their eyes beheld. This divine nomen became the appropriately magnum-size moniker for the ivory-billed woodpecker. This relic of other eras survived through climatic shifts and whatever acts of nature and First Peoples might have challenged their existence. Standing shoulder to winged shoulder, it shared landscapes with Carolina parakeets, swamp cane (Bachman’s) warblers, and passenger pigeons—all now extinct. We think.

Before the end(s) for Lord God and the others came, Indigenous southeastern and Mississippian peoples saw this bird and learned of its power. They watched it hack-hammer its way through trees with an aplomb usually possessed only by strong men with adzes. Some may have collected the beak and feathers as talismans or ceremonial ornaments—a way to empower themselves with the bird’s magic.

Whatever hue you might be, can you imagine the first white men laying eyes on such a sight, thinking in their explore-and-conquer minds that the pileated woodpecker, also known as the “wood hen,” was the greatest pecker wood bird of the land—but there in front of them, swooping from one gargantuan sycamore to the next, was a much larger bird that was only superficially similar. Imagine them watching the giant they’d take credit for “discovering” hitch itself by zygodactylous feet—two toes forward and two toes backward, with a sharp gripping claw on each digit—inch by inch upward, braced by a board-stiff tail against the tree while it probed the crevices for delicacies. Its size awed them, but then came the toy tinhorn call, “kent, kent, kent,” which did not. A nuthatch’s voice crammed inside a raven. There was a moment of laughter and comic relief. It was as if God, in all its splendor, squeaked.

The big bird stopped as the stunned colonizer stared, not daring to breathe. But then, in a quick motion the watcher might have thought impossible for such a behemoth, the bird heaved a hacking blow, showering the forest floor with splinters. Thwack! Thwack! The hammerhead chiseling continued in double-rap knocks with the occasional kent thrown in for levity. But the watcher could not laugh. The chuckle stayed lodged in the throat, held by awe. Perhaps a smile creased their face. And if I had been that fortunate watcher, it would have been a tear, flowing in gratitude and disbelief.

Does the Lord God bird still exist? That’s the brass-tacks, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road question. There’s possibility and there’s probability. Science proffers the latter and poetry the former. I tend both sides of the coin. I am also a southern Black man. This means my perspective gets flipped in odd ways. I’ve loved birds for most of my sixty years. The bobwhite quail, flushing and calling during my daily migrations between my grandmother’s early twentieth-century life and my parents’ mid-century modern life, was my introduction to a lifelong avian codependency. Not just the quail shadowed in thickets, but the barred owls calling from the creek bottom, the snow birds gathering on bare winter ground, and the rain crows forecasting summer storms. I came to know them as friends I could count on.

My familiar backyard birds were just a small sampling of species one might see in North America and an even smaller portion of what one might glimpse worldwide. At an early age, I began to plan a life around seeing as many of them as I could. I confessed to anyone who’d listen that being an ornithologist was my career dream. Despite all the roadblocks and sometimes tragic delays, I never lost sight of, or at least faith in, the idea that birds were to be my purpose. But then, somewhere in my mid-elementary school years, I learned about birds that I couldn’t see alive and in color: great auks, passenger pigeons, heath hens, Carolina parakeets, and ivory-billed woodpeckers. Birds I would never be able to see beyond painted pictures, grainy photographs, and sepia-stained film footage. Birds that were gone forever, extinct.

These birds held an even greater fascination. Maybe it was a transfer of belief left over after Santa was debunked. But, even as a child, I believed—and I still do—that for some species, extinction is not so much a tombstone as a bookmark, a placeholder giving us time to find them again, or maybe to properly mourn their disappearance so we don’t repeat the sins that made them vanish.

Among the birding community, from professional ornithologists to occasional backyard birders, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s extinction has been controversial. Credentials have been questioned. Reputations have been tainted. There have been alleged sightings, but every one of them seems impossible to verify. People swear upon unholy things that ivory-billeds have visited their backyard suet feeders. I’ve received secret phone calls and anonymous emails in which people refuse to give their names. Kent calls and diagnostic double-rap knocks are heard deep in mature forests only to be revealed as bridges’ joints “talking” with the passage of traffic, or maybe the ambitious call of a tiny nuthatch that wants to be Lord God itself.

The only film that exists was made in the mid-1930s by Arthur Allen, a Cornell researcher who chased the bird in Florida swamps, recording sights and sounds that few have heard since. Allen’s black-and-white film is haunting. Even in that colorless, flat reel-to-reel, the woodpeckers seem somehow otherworldly, their eyes and beaks gleaming, potential last lives of a species in a world where economic depression and rising fascism dominated the news. My grandparents would have been raising my parents as toddlers in a country where their color meant second-class citizenry. How many in those times even cared if the woodpecker vanished from existence? If my grandmother’s biblical mantra is true—“Faith without works is dead”—then in ornithology, a “specimen” is required for any faith in a sighting to be bona fide. Not one has been provided.

People swear upon unholy things that ivory-billeds have visited their backyard suet feeders.

ONE MORNING IN 2005, on the way back to my office between classes, one of my graduate students, Bran Cromer—now a seasoned college professor—stopped me in the hallway.

“Have you heard the news, Dr. Lanham?” Poker-faced by nature, he was excited in a way I wasn’t used to seeing.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “What’s up?”

“They found it!”

“Found what, Bran. What did they find?” My next class was in just a few minutes, and I needed to get my notes together before heading over.

“They found an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas!” Bran said.

I was stunned. “What? Where?”

“In some Arkansas swamp. It’s on the internet. You should look it up!”

Back in my office, with Guy Coheleach’s painting of Lord Gods looking down on me, I found the story on Netscape 2.0: “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Rediscovered in Arkansas.” I printed out what I could and hurried to class. As one hundred undergraduates settled into their seats, no doubt ready for another seventy-five minutes of hearing about the natural world going to hell in a habitat-fragmenting, climate-warming, extinction-riddled handbasket, I led off the lecture with one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous poems:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

To the room of puzzled faces, I announced the rediscovery as if I’d been there myself. The story shone large on the screen as I waxed on and on about how important the finding was, how, in so many ways, it was connected to what we’d been discussing in class. This, I explained, was why we did the work we did as conservation professionals, in the hope that some long-lost soul gets saved to live another day. I had imagined exploring that river swamp for so many years that I almost felt as if I had witnessed the Sasquatch of birds firsthand. But, as I spoke, I could also feel my own incredulity at the sighting growing.

As a birder, I’ve seen improbably rare birds. But I’ve also conjured shadows into the desired shapes of species I’ve wished to see. I try to abide by the mantra I’ve always taught my students: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras—unless you’re in Africa.” That is to say, defer to the common and probable explanation rather than the rare, improbable one. But in this case, the deep, dark hardwood forests along the Mississippi River drainages of Arkansas turned the impossible into the remotely probable. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I let the class go early. I needed space to celebrate the unmourning of something I’d believed forever gone.

Yet even the Arkansas story, which gave so many so much hope, was eventually cast into doubt. People who studied the footage of the sighting couldn’t undeniably verify the birds as definitive Lord God. Arguments and finger-pointing and birder-credential cancellations ensued at the highest levels of ornithological debate. Lots were cast on the report’s veracity. Two opposing parties quickly took shape: the believers and the nonbelievers. Twenty years later, researchers continue to comb the few remaining woods still deep enough for ivory-billed woodpeckers. Other work is conducted in the quiet of research labs to avoid the attention of rabid birders, who’d flood any area with the taint of Lord God in hopes of being among the privileged listers to tick the bird. That, or they would become doubters, throwing wet blankets on the researchers’ hopes for making the impossible possible once more.

I believe a little bit of mystery is essential to make wonder work.

ON THE ONE HAND, I’m not committed to extinction’s condemnation. But then, on the other, my scientist’s data-hungry mind asks for more evidence. I convince myself one day that yes, the Lord God Bird exists and then, the next day, I squash all hope with an obliterative hammer. But there are other acts of conjuring. The skilled artist can reanimate the dead with paint or stone or wood. The writer in me can play with tenses.

There are dozens of known representations of ivory-billed woodpeckers, and likely scores more uncatalogued and unappreciated. I hoard all the ones I can find. I have paintings for which I’ve paid hundreds of dollars and an immaculate secondhand store statue that cost less than five. Walk into my office at Clemson University and hanging above my desk is artist Guy Coheleach’s rendering of two ivory-billed woodpeckers, foraging on the bole of what looks like a southern live oak. The wild-eyed birds are caught as artfully as any artist could hope for, their namesake bills poised like wood chisels waiting to whale away at the tree. My friend Julie Zickefoose, an Ohio artist, also made a rendering in which the dark bottomland habitat was as memorable as the bird itself. These and other tributes—paintings, bumper stickers, license plates, a flying mobile, an iron-framed, wood-burned painting—speak to my own faith, or maybe fantasy, in what feathers can evoke.

It’s impossible to know how many other renderings there might be. There is Mark Catesby’s stilted illustration. Though others knew the special nature of the great bird long before, he was the first to describe it to western (European) science in 1743 as Picus maximus rostro albo; “the largest white-bill woodpecker.” Alexander Wilson’s drawing, a 2-D presentation, has a story that adds even greater dimensionality. Desperate to capture the image for the first American Ornithology, Wilson attempted to hold an ivory-billed woodpecker captive in a boarding room. It was a mistake for both bird and birder as the woodpecker “wreaked his whole vengeance” on the walls and furniture. It would be hard to imagine Wilson handling the Lord God itself and not suffering some sort of bodily injury from a bird evolved to manufacture puncture wounds in wood.

For a wild thing accustomed to roaming woods and North Carolina swamps, life inside four walls and a few square feet was met with an appropriately wild resistance. Wilson bemoaned that the bird “displayed such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods.” Alas, he held the bird hostage for its image and watched it die. That first recorded interaction between black bird and white man holds my fascination. The power, determination, and untamable nature of a being that would rather die than suffer captivity speaks to me as the descendant of a people who chose death in the Middle Passage or fought relentlessly while enslaved to regain freedom. The doomed Lord God Bird that Wilson captured would serve as allegory for the times to come, servitude with no chance at liberty.

If we continue through the litany of artists who portrayed ivory-bills from life and plein air witness, the master of American bird artists steps to the forefront. A contemporary of Wilson’s, but more the artistic innovator, a self-promotor, and an enslaver, John James Audubon—the man who makes many forget that any other bird artist ever existed— also painted ivory-billed woodpeckers, and possibly ate them too. Not to obtain their power, mind you, but because painting, killing, and eating was how he claimed preeminent status as America’s Ornithological Daddy. John James’s portrait of “the great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe” is more alive than any other artist’s before him and many that came after. In it, the birds are whirling on the branch, seemingly arguing about who gets next peck at the grubs. Audubon had an audacious ability to reanimate the birds he’d just slain. By re-posing his subjects with wire that he’d pushed into their lifeless bodies, the dead that he painted seemed to come alive on the page.

For a man who cared neither for Black nor Indigenous peoples, Audubon did recognize the ivory-billed’s importance to some Native Americans. I can’t help but wonder, though, about his extensive travels through the South. Ivory-billed woodpeckers would have shared vast wooded landscapes with enslaved Black people, who also worked, worshipped, and sought refuge from their predicament as chattel in the wilderness. I wonder what Audubon learned from those people about the Lord God, and how that knowledge entered into his perception and portrayal. There is no hint that John James met woods-going Black folks in bird-watching witness, except for his horrific account of re-enslaving a Black family he encountered on a birding excursion in a swamp. I imagine that the Lord God saw the human-trafficking tragedy in real time. Whether that witness was bird or divinity, it cast a pall on the great bird artist that I cannot forget or forgive.

As a cultural and conservation ornithologist, I’m always thinking beyond my binoculars. For me, a bird’s identity goes further than field marks and feathers to encompass how that bird might have lived among human histories and what that means for its future. Sometimes, that truth is captured by portrayals that are more interpretive than strictly ornithologically correct. Like the painting I saw in a Chicago museum. Frankly, I can’t even remember what museum it was, other than to say it wasn’t the Field. As I cruised past exhibits and installations, in a hurry before some speaking gig, I stopped. There, hanging on a huge board, was a painting of a Lord God Bird.

Because Lord God always demands worship, I offered my praise. As my eyes took in the whole scene, I caught sight of something even more arresting than the Gone Bird: a noose slung over the branch on which the woodpecker searched for its food. The dark forest, the ivory bill, and the specter of executed Black human beings struck me so hard, it altered my ideas of what was and what we wish for in our desperate attempts to save nature. It reminded me that the height of the bird’s existence in a burgeoning young America would have coincided with much of the history that makes us, us. That includes four hundred years of enslavement, apartheid, and policy to keep my people second-class or worse. This includes killing people just because they were Black. Nothing else, other than a trumped-up charge and/or lie, would put some doomed soul neck-stretched on the end of a rope opposite the Lord God.

At that moment, bird or divinity wouldn’t have mattered. That picture stopped me like none had before. As I think ecologically about what should be and what shouldn’t, I think about the memories that restoration or de-extinction might stir in some tree—or in some bird—that witnessed such horrific happenings. This is how I watch birds now: with a field of view that sees history as part of the landscape.

Watching birds won’t be enough to save them.

WHEN FOLKS ASK ME if I believe the bird still exists, I quibble and say, “It might.” I cannot disprove existence by absence. It could very well be cryptic enough to hide, or it may be in one place when I’m looking in another. I mean, would you want to be found by the beings that destroyed your world? Maybe the Lord God (bird?) has a plan we can’t fathom with our constrained human minds. I believe a little bit of mystery is essential to make wonder work.

Curiosity is the commodity that drives my love for birds. I want to know the birds, but I also want to know birds, to not just identify them, but to identify with them. I’ve come through all these words, now, twenty years past the rediscovery of Lord God Bird, to say that extinct birds have changed how I see the wild wide world and us as watchers, and hopefully lovers, within it. It’d be satisfying to say that love, multiplied over all the people who claim my kind of obsession for birds, would make a difference in the birds’ lives. But unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

Watching birds won’t be enough to save them. Even as millions of North American birders stare at backyard feeders, fly into off-grid wilderness, and rideshare to urban centers to look for must-see species, bird populations have declined precipitously. Billions have been lost over the past fifty years. With millions of people paying so much attention, how can this be? Shouldn’t all those eyes and ears trained on feathered things make some kind of difference in the declines?

By most measures, birding is one of the most popular outdoor avocations in the United States and Canada. At one time a closet hobby of the quirky, big-pocketed, canvas-vested, middle-aged white and wealthy, it has evolved somewhat to bring in younger, occasionally more colorful birders. This zealous younger contingent increasingly depends upon the magic of AI or phone to determine what the hell they’re listening to or looking at. No longer are field guides considered the essential sidearm of the birdwatcher. Now, an e-wizard will tell you, within seconds, what flipping pages in a field guide may have yielded in minutes or, God forbid, hours, days, or years. What used to be called “bird study” is now instant gratification. Now, we can know the name of a bird simply by tapping our screens.

By now, I’m sure some readers have labeled me a curmudgeon, a Luddite, a stick-in-the-mud old man who decries technology as the end times. It’s true that these tools have their places in leveraging a better birding experience. But I also sense that they compound the “need to know now” by several orders of magnitude. Just as most technological advances can bring humanity to a better place, they also have their dark sides. The expansion of technologies like telegraph wire and railway travel triggered the demise of the passenger pigeon. Similarly, more effective swamp-draining machines—backed by policy, demands for wood, and a country constantly at war—are the primary causes cited in the demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker. I too like my coffee hot, my internet reliably fast, and my carbon-emitting cross-country flights on time. But I also wonder if we’re cheating one another out of experiencing the mystery in nature.

My argument against these tools—at least for those of us concerned with the welfare of birds beyond the moment they become tick-able on some list—is to critically moderate our dependence on them. The bird identification might be spot-on, but it comes at the expense of the deeply marinated, slow-cooked identifying with the bird. At best, it’s microwaved ornithology. It’s easy to learn, by magical algorithm, that the confusing fall warbler you happened to snap a photo of with your 10,000x lens—rictal bristles clear as the whiskers on your indoor cat—is actually a bay-breasted and not a blackpoll. But does the e-discoverer learn anything more beyond a name to post they saw? Does the techno- birder learn that blackpoll warblers migrate mostly over a watery Atlantic Ocean course for thousands of miles, eschewing the land route of the bay-breasted? Does it bring a greater desire to do something for conservation and make sure we might even see more species come spring or the next autumn?

Back in the day, before I was screaming for young birders to “get off my lawn with their apps hangin’ out,” there was this thing called an “RBA,” a Rare Bird Alert, that required you to pick up the landline or bag phone to call a number. On the other end, some monotoned volunteer voice would tell of the rarities that had recently been seen. Then, the voice would give approximate locales where the interested caller would then have to travel with a DeLorme Road Atlas (which required an understanding of cartography and cardinal directions) to an approximate location where the reported bird had been observed at some earlier date. “Hello, this is John Smith, for the Upstate South Carolina Rare Bird Alert, week of October 1, 1992. This week, buff-breasted sandpipers at the sod farm. Golden-winged warbler in the university botanical garden, and a pomarine jaeger at a local lake lookout.” Now, this system seems not just antiquarian, but laughably ambiguous.

These days, we have the pin drop. A map link gives a precise lat-long and, within minutes of the posting, listers armed with scopes, long lenses, binoculars, cell phones, and the mystical e-wizard crowd around the wayward rarity, probably ignoring all the other home birds and migrants en route for the seldom seen one. I’ve often wondered how heavy that map pin must be on the back of some Arctic-breeding sandpiper that’s lost its way to Patagonia, or some western-tending warbler that’s wandered beyond the expected 100th meridian range. I’ve also wondered if those scrambling to see it think about the probable dead end that such a mistake portends for the bird.

I believe that some understanding of the individual bird’s plight is the gateway to empathy. Empathy is the essential but elusive component missing from wildlife conservation. Draw a line graph of the relationship between bird-watching popularity and bird population trends and it approximates an X. Could the intersection be the point where empathy blooms, or is it where it disappears? Perhaps it marks the place where birds become commodities rather than beings to identify with and protect.

Uniqueness has always been a part of the odd economy of ornithology. American birders from Audubon onward have gone to extreme ends to see the dwindling species or the out-of-range rarity. To wit, that putative rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 2005. Once word was out that the Lord God Bird had been resurrected, the small town in Arkansas became a hot spot, with businesses who’d nev- er paid any attention to bird-watching as an industry suddenly steeping themselves in ivory-billed swag. Even my personal experience leading tours for almost thirty years is that the “good” birds are counted carefully, while the ho-hum home-range regulars get short shrift.

Enough of the soapbox. But I wonder, if those folks in the Arkansas swamp would’ve had an e-wizard along with them, if it’d have confirmed their Lord God sighting as bona fide. My inquiring mind wonders now. I’m hoping there’s not a place for Gone Birds on any wizardly app. I haven’t checked.

I’VE HELD THE IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER, along with other Gone Birds, as museum specimens. The experience of wearing latex gloves, handling a cotton-stuffed corpse, is a postmortem of memories I wish I had. It feels odd, clinical. There’s no heartbeat there. No wild blood coursing through super-metabolized avian tissue. It is tangible evidence of a tragedy on every level of existence, one that makes it almost impossible to separate science from the spiritual.

As technology brings Dr. Frankenstein’s dreams to life, should we de-extinct Gone Birds and other beings? Habitat destruction means that much of wildlife conservation is now an exercise in parks protection. We have designated areas where nature and wildness are supposed to “happen,” but they are crumbling under multiple-use demands, and human “progress” is pushing ever inward on the boundaries. Besides, wild things tend not to obey boundaries like signs and borders. Ivory-billed woodpeckers had (have?) expansive habitat requirements. Creating a population without such areas available would be sinful, in my opinion, like creating a monster with no mate or place to live. I think the bigger benefit lies in us wallowing in loss. Let the sins sting so we learn to do better next time. In the end, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s world was more valuable for the wartime wood it could produce than for the Lord God Birds it harbored. Can we say we would do any better now?

“Do you believe?” That’s the question people ask when I speak in wistful, worshipful tones about ivory-billed woodpeckers. The question usually hangs there for a bit as I pause for dramatic effect, trying to read the inquisitor, to see where my response might land among their ideas of ridiculous and reality. Most seem to be looking to me for something resembling hope. With all these years spent thinking about questions of existence—mine, my ancestors’, and the birds’—I’m quicker now to reply, “Yes, I believe in the Lord God Bird.” Existence then becomes a subtly moot point. That leaves everything on the table for the questioner to question, giving them the chance to paint their own picture of where ivory-billed woodpeckers perch, both in their hearts and mine.

Hanging on my study wall at home is a wood-burned portrait of two Lord God Birds, attended by a small flock of Carolina parakeets and a tandem of skulking swamp cane (Bachman’s) warblers. The scene, carved and burned into ancient Florida cypress by my friend Tom Belzer, writhes with the lives of birds that science tells me have gone on. It just so happens that the scene is framed in thick iron and shaped like a cathedral window. That’s my view into a kind of hope with feathers, and as much religion as I hang on to these days. The heart is the witness for whatever I believe. No dead Lord God bodies required.