Bunch of Amateurs (11 page)

That day, I did most of the talking (not unusual). I found out, for instance, that there were only a half dozen species of birds in this hemisphere that he had never personally seen—birds which nested on the ocean and required super-expensive boat trips in harsh environments to see. But when, during the course of this (or any) casual conversation, Sibley’s peripheral vision senses a slight speck scoring a
thin black line in the sky, he immediately cuts off everyone and tunes out the rest of the world. When I was with him, he turned mechanically, instantly, and precisely in the direction of the bird. His high-powered binoculars were on his eyes and the bird was centered in his field of focus in half a second.

“Yellow-shafted flicker,” he might say. Meanwhile I’m squinting at a distant circumflex and then struggling with my binoculars until finally I get a glimpse of a departing speck. Throughout all this, I might try to keep the conversation going, but Sibley’s body language has a way of communicating that he’s no longer there for you. He is inside the binoculars for those few seconds. It’s as if he’s gone, left his body, literally ecstatic.

On several occasions, I didn’t even bother to look at the bird, so riveting was it to watch a man in the grip of an irresistible thing. It always seemed sacrilegious to continue talking. This was hallowed time, bird identification time, concentration time.

On this very afternoon, Sibley was looking in one direction and I in another. And I spotted a bird first and raised my binoculars. I got it quickly in focus and could see right away what it was.

“It’s just a seagull,” I said and lowered my binoculars. I saw that Sibley nevertheless had his gaze fixed intently on the bird. Sibley’s body language and radiant silence was telling me that, even if I didn’t think so, the bell jar of avian solemnity had descended over this entire meadow. Sibley was in the bird zone, his face tense with study. I slammed the binoculars back to my eyes and fixed my field of focus on the bird. Had I missed something? Was it a wayward albatross? But I grew up on the ocean. I know my gulls, and unquestionably that was nothing more than an everyday seagull.

“It is just a seagull, isn’t it?” I said, again lowering my binoculars and looking at him. And then he said this simple, little thing. He didn’t say it pretentiously or ominously. I could make it sound like the Buddha talking or Yoda training his Jedis. But it wasn’t like that.
Sibley has a nearly petit way of talking. And this was Sibley at his most fragile and vulnerable, as if he wanted me to understand something but lacked the words for it. So he just said this thing that has stayed with me ever since.

“It’s a bird,” he said. Again, I got the glasses back on my eyes. But I realized there were no binoculars powerful enough to show me what he was seeing. I was furious, silently berating myself for my fatuous dismissal—so quick to see the tiresome seagull, the bird of landfills, the ocean pest, the flying rat, the scavenger gull of my teenage years when we all repeated the shoreline legend about what happened when you fed them Alka-Seltzer.

Later I saw him pleasantly lost in a reverie of crows. For Sibley, he’s always looking at birds he’s seen a thousand times as if he’s seeing them for the first time. That’s a skill born of love, amateurism in the best sense. It’s an obsession, the kind that makes you drift off into the woods in college, so consumed with the unutterable pleasure of the work that you forget, ultimately, about earning a degree.

One thing that marks the amateur, the best of them, is this talent for not seeing things according to the dominant paradigm. One of the traits Thomas S. Kuhn describes in his
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
is this ability not to see things according to the reigning paradigm of the day. The much abused phrase “paradigm shift” is a regular feature of scientific breakthrough in part because certain people can see through the frame within which everyone else dwells and see something different.

A 2006
Harvard Business Review
article detailed the Curse of Knowledge, reporting that many breakthroughs are achieved by people who don’t know the jargon and minutiae of a field, who work outside the realm of day-to-day expertise. Lacking that detailed scaffolding of understanding, they can often see things that insiders look right past. Think of those instruction manuals that came with the computers of the 1990s. They were written by the computer programmers
who had lived deep inside the vast world of alt-shift-return-F7. To them, those instructions were easy because they lived inside the paradigm. To those of us outside, their manuals were frustratingly opaque, eventually hilariously so. We had to wait for some outsiders to write those
PC for Dummies
books so we could find out how to work a computer.

Once, in between sightings, I asked Sibley why he painted birds at all when you could so easily just take super-detailed digital pictures of what he saw in the lenses. He explained that a picture is a specific bird, and each bird is slightly different from the
essential
bird of that species.

Each oriole is different in the way that every person is different, yet there are certain qualities that capture the very essence of orioleness. And the way the brain works, he said, makes it crucial to paint. If we see the quintessential oriole, our brains can typically pick out all the variations and make that call. Sibley doesn’t paint any one oriole but (and this is part of what he’s looking for when he glues the binoculars to his eyes) a stylized oriole all of us can see.

Every time he lifts his binoculars, he is looking for tiny elements—secondary feathers, some tuft, a unique shape to the tail—that essentially capture the bird in view. What does a platonic seagull look like? And that’s why he can get lost with every winged creature that flaps within view. It’s a bird, to Sibley, but one that may yield one more detail, moving his understanding that much closer to the platonic bird of that species. There’s always time for one more look at some impish blue jay or pudgy owl. That’s why Sibley’s explanation of the Luneau video ended the argument for a lot of birders. They know that almost no one on the earth can see a bird the way that Sibley can. They know what I know. He may not be a credentialed ornithologist, but he is among the best bird spotters alive. Yet Sibley’s paper was careful. He didn’t say the ivory-bill didn’t exist. He carefully said that the Luneau video was not the proof.

Still, plenty of birders refused to believe Sibley’s evidence. And
forget about wingbeats and de-interlacing, what about the seven ornithologists who saw the bird personally? And the sound tapes? There was still plenty of hope. And just before this latest challenge emerged, the hopeful convened in Brinkley, Arkansas, for what was headlined as the first annual ivory-billed woodpecker festival. I was offered a free tour of the swamp to try my hand at seeing the bird myself, so I booked a plane ticket.

First day out, I spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker.

Or at least I can now add my name to the list of those who make that claim. It was a mild February in the swamp when I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cell phone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe, and a big desire. “I’m game,” he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas’ most famous bottomland swamp.

Even though I grew up among South Carolina’s cypress swamps, I had never seen cypress trees this huge and haunting. Towering beside them was the ancient tupelo, like some Devonian Period beta version of “tree.” These thousand-year-old senator trees are large enough at the base to garage a car, and then they suddenly narrow like a wine bottle before shooting up into a regular tree. Tippit and I spent the day paddling into swampy cul-de-sacs and just hanging there, strictly quiet, for half an hour at a stretch.

“You can’t find the bird,” Tippit said in his most casual Zen. “The
bird has to find you.” By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. At times, the dimming forest could be as chatty as a crowded cocktail party, filled with the call of the pileated woodpecker.

Then: “Ivory-bill!” Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large, dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.

I knew the drill. To confirm the sighting, I asked Tippit to report to me precisely what he had seen. As with any witness, it was important to set the interview down on paper as soon as possible. Tippit called out: “Two white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white.” He called it in on his cell phone. And since that winter evening, I have been able to say, “I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker.”

And yet I have not said it. Later that night, during the festival, when people would make conversation, they’d ask, “Did you go out today?” And I’d say yes and move on to marveling at the size of the cypress trees. I just didn’t have it in me to make the boast, and it felt especially odd because “ivory-bills” were everywhere.

The little town of Brinkley (formerly Lick Skillet, Arkansas) had really gussied itself up for the Call of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Celebration. I fully expected to see a parade led by Robert Preston sporting an ivory-bill haircut (available at Penny’s Hair Care for $25). A modest motel had been renamed the Ivory-Billed Inn. Gene’s Restaurant and Barbecue offered an ivory-bill cheeseburger. There was even ivory-bill “blue”: I bought a T-shirt that read
GOT PECKER?

There were lots of T-shirts and tours, and
www.ivorybilledexpeditions.com
offered the cheapest rate at $325 per person. The
deluxe was $2300 and your guide was Gene Sparling, the kayaker who first spotted the bird.

Soon enough there were limited reproductions of Audubon’s famous ivory-bill drawing from 1829, issued by “Discovery Editions.” Governor Mike Huckabee issued ivory-bill stamps. On a television set one might see a public service announcement asking for funds, which piped:

“Emily Dickinson said, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas would like to add that hope also has an ivory-colored beak and eats wood grubs.”

Ivory-bills were everywhere, and yet talk of
seeing
the bird was conscientiously absent. It’s hard to describe, but it was like saying you’d walked on the moon or been anointed by the Dalai Lama. It was a boast of immense magnitude, exalting to claim.

For instance, I went to a talk given by Sharon Stiteler, a perky, witty, smiling blonde who is the host of
birdchick.com
. Everyone knew that she had been invited by Cornell to spend a few weeks in the swamp. This very fact gave her an air of privilege and her talk a sense of potent authority—and she was discussing bird feeders. During the Q and A period afterward, she pointed at me for a question. So I asked: “Have you seen an ivory-billed woodpecker?” It was as if I’d dropped a glass on the floor. The room went weirdly silent. The smile on Stiteler’s face flickered away, quick as a chickadee. “I am not allowed to comment on that,” she said. “I was out with Cornell in December and had to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements.”

The act of birding, ultimately, is a very stylized form of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, “I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree,” even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don’t have yellow wingtips and don’t cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural
history, and this is what I picked up with Sibley: The story gets told in a vivid but almost private language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style, and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.

Claiming to have seen a rare bird requires an even more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur’s depth of knowledge. Saying “I saw an ivory-bill’s long black neck and white trailing feathers” requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.

If you don’t pull it off, then superior birders diss you. It’s all about cred. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your skills—to trust you, to believe you. So just who gets to tell the story of seeing an ivory-bill? I spent the entire festival trying to find that out. Cornell claims that seven members of their search team saw the bird, but they weren’t gabbing in the halls about it either.

That intimidating institutional demand for silence was everywhere. There
was
a great ivory-bill story, but this, too, was very carefully stage-managed, coordinated, and controlled. I picked up the festival guide and saw the schedule. Cornell was holding it back—the telling of the most famous ivory-bill sighting. This was the dual sighting by the editor of
Living Bird
magazine, Tim Gallagher, and his good friend Bobby Harrison. These two men saw the bird together, and for this festival they were going to tell all about it. The story itself was the central event of the entire festival—an evening affair, after dinner, standing room only.