In concluding this paper a general description of the male ivory-bill may prove acceptable to those who may never be able to see even a stuffed specimen of a bird which, taken in every way, is, perhaps, the most interesting and beautiful in America. In size 21 inches long, and 33 in alar extent; bill, ivory white, beautifully fluted above, and two and a-half inches long; head-tuft, or crest, long and fine, of pure scarlet faced with black. Its body-color is glossy blue-black, but down its slender neck on each side, running from the crest to the back, a pure white stripe contrasts vividly with the scarlet and ebony. A mass of white runs across the back when the wings are closed…leaving the wing-tips and tail black. Its feet are ash-blue, its eyes amber-yellow. The female is like the male, save that she has a black crest instead of the scarlet. I can think of nothing in Nature more striking than the flash of color this bird gives to the dreary swamp-landscape, as it careers from tree to tree, or sits upon some high skeleton cypress-branch and plies its resounding blows. The species will probably be extinct within a few years.*
*Since writing the foregoing, I have made several excursions in search of the ivory-bill. Early in January, 1885, I killed a fine male specimen in a swamp near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; but was prevented, by an accident, from preserving it or making a sketch of it.
THE IRONY IS RIGHT THERE, IN FRONT OF THE READER. After a paragraph closing with the remark that the ivory-billed woodpecker will likely soon be extinct, Maurice Thompson, author, reports on killing a male he later found. He is not alone; among many naturalists of his time, appreciation of bird life often involved a shotgun and/or a spate of nest and/or egg collecting. What I find baffling is that many of the naturalists also recognized that species were becoming endangered, yet still they persevered. It is a miracle, I think, that so many birds still survived to this day. Alas, the ivory-billed woodpecker is not among them. Thompson clearly admired the bird greatly and held it up as a paragon of Nature’s beauty:
Of all our wild American birds, I have studied no other one which combines all of the elements of wildness so perfectly in its character as does the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Indeed, when describing his trip into a swamp to await the birds’ arrival at their nest hole in a stump, Thompson even called them the King and Queen of the Woodpeckers. He watched a pair of them for day after day, during which time “excepting a visitation of mosquitoes now and then, nothing occurred to mar my enjoyment.” Alas, they eventually realized he was watching them from his hiding place, “and that was the end of all intimacy between us.”
SOMETIME SOON AFTERWARDS, THOMPSON DECIDED TO TAKE ACTION FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE. “I reached the determination,” he explains to his readers, “that it was my duty to rob that nest in the interest of knowledge,”Digging deep into the stump’s recesses, he observed that
Five beautiful pure white eggs of the finest old-china appearance, delicate, almost transparent, exceedingly fragile, and, to the eyes of a collector, vastly valuable, lay in a shallow bowl of pine chips. But in breaking away the last-piece of wood-crust, I jerked it a little too hard, and those much-coveted prizes rolled out and fell to the ground. Of course they were “hopelessly crushed,” and my feelings with them…. Once or twice I went back to the spot in early morning, but my birds did not appear.
At the close of his book, Thompson speaks rapturously of “the unrecognized and unnamed science of bird-loving.” But if killing birds for art or collecting their eggs for a museum display is love, then truly the ivory-billed woodpecker was loved to death.
MY COPY OF THIS BOOK WAS SINGULARLY NONDESCRIPT. It is an original 1885 copy (I do not believe it was ever reissued), completely lacking illustrations. The book is tall, narrow, and slender, the pages browned and tearing easily. Besides its deteriorating binding and pages, it contains no traces of its 135-year history.