Smeared Type

There they were. Plumed relics of a bygone era. They were lying horizontally like frozen soldiers, straight, stiff and at attention. The odor of naphthalene wafted up from mothballs that were strewn in the thousands along the bottoms of the cabinets. Dr. David Willard, resident ornithologist at Chicago’s world-renowned Field Museum, delicately lifted one of the specimens for us to take a closer look. The ivory-billed woodpecker. Campephilus Principalis. A dead ringer for the prehistoric pterodactyl, the bird in his hands was probably 18-inches long from tip of tail to top of head. The feathers were black, capped with a bright red crest and punctuated by a thick white stripe that was erratically etched along its back like a lightening bolt.  The distinct ivory-white bill protruded 2-inches from its head like a plastic dart. For a brief moment I imagined the bird would wake from its long slumber, flap its wings and fly off the scientist’s hands. But the marked tags, metal leg bands and cotton wool eyes promptly cut off that thought. The life of this particular bird had been extinguished in 1896 when it was discovered somewhere in the bottomland swam forests of Arkansas. The historical range of its species stretched along the band of old growth forests that once blanketed the southeastern United States and up the Mississippi River as far north as St. Louis. But the large forests are no more. They have dwindled down to collections of green islands amid seas of grey concrete and black asphalt.  The last time the species was documented alive was in 1942.  A controversy surfaced in 2004 beginning in the scientific community and then spreading to the main media. It made all the headlines. Footage of a flying ivory-bill was captured on video but the evidence was not conclusive. The footage was too grainy and skeptics claimed the video showed the ivory-bill’s closest cousin – the pileated woodpecker. The skeptics have not been proved wrong in the five years since.

Dr. Willard then picked up a passenger pigeon. Ectopistes Migratorius. A fairly ordinary looking bird, it looked not too dissimilar from the grey pigeon that populates our cities and towns in abundance. The passenger pigeon once flourished in the billions. Eyewitnesses noted that they would migrate in flocks a mile wide and 300-miles long. It must have been an eerie vision to see such a huge moving dark mass of fluttering wings. Starting in the 1800’s the pigeons’ abundance was a boon for the new settlers and frontiersmen. Their cheap meat was commercialized for the poor and slaves. Enterprises were set up to trap the birds, kill them on a massive scale and ship them to the burgeoning human populations in the east. A decline in their numbers began on a catastrophic scale in the 1870’s and the last known living passenger pigeon, ‘Martha’, died in Cincinnati in 1914. Nobody knows for sure what precipitated such a rapid extinction but it was most likely a combination of many factors – disease, habitat destruction and large-scale slaughter.

Dr. Willard’s collection, one of the largest in the world, contains birds of all shapes, sizes and colors. Some species disappeared long ago and some still flourish today. In one drawer he pulled out the magnificent roseate spoonbill (Platalea Ajaja), a most unusual heron-like bird with pinkish feathers and a beak like a wooden spatula, specially designed to wade in shallow estuaries to sift sediments for small crustaceans; the scarlet ibis (Eudocimus Ruber), another wader with a bill like a sickle. There was the western meadowlark (Sturnella Neglecta), a glorious and abundant songbird with a mottled brown rump and yellow breast with a thick black “V” painted across its throat.  There was also the exotic tropical delight – the russet-backed oropendola (Psarocolius angustifrons) whose peculiar calls most closely resemble that of a flushing toilet.

I looked up from the two or three drawers that Dr. Willard had slid open in one cabinet. I noticed that each cabinet contained fifteen or twenty drawers. And there must have been hundreds of cabinets in that hallway – a truly astounding collection and a small testament to man’s continual quest to catalogue, explore and discover.

Pgoodman@allieddistrictproperties.com - Author of a Number of Articles and Papers on Environmental Issues