—Arthur Allen, founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
The STRUGGLE to PROVE the MAJESTIC IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER STILL EXISTS HAS OBSESSED BELIEVERS and EXASPERATED DOUBTERS for a CENTURY. NOW PHOTOGRAPHER BOBBY HARRISON is RACING to DOCUMENT the BIRD ONCE and for ALL BEFORE the GOVERNMENT DECLARES IT EXTINCT
THE bird has many names, often divinely inspired: the Lord God Bird, the Lazarus Bird, the Ghost Bird, the Grail Bird. Bobby Harrison is a religious man, but he doesn’t like any of them. He prefers to call it what it is: an ivory-billed woodpecker. “Well,” he says with a shrug, “it is just a bird, after all.”
That might seem like an undersell for someone who on this steaming August day is preparing to shove off into the humid, murky shade of an Arkansas swamp on his two-thousandth-plus search for the ivorybill, whose last-agreed-upon sighting in the United States occurred in 1944. But Harrison’s undersell has the ring of the believer: To him, the ivorybill is, like any other bird, made of hollow bones, feathers, a bill. It doesn’t have celestial powers; it’s not a messenger from on high. Instead, it’s still out in the Southern wilds, doing bird things, flying around as it always has. Harrison will tell you all this because he’s seen one. Other people will tell you, very firmly, that he has not—and the clock is now ticking for him to persuade them otherwise.
Any day now, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) will decide whether to declare the ivorybill extinct, which would strip it of all protections and put an official death stamp on a species that has sparked a heated, century-long debate; captured imaginations; marred reputations; influenced the creation of Congaree National Park; and sparked infighting in the scientific community between those who demand hard proof and those who say the ivorybill has persisted against all odds, transformed by natural selection into a creature so quiet, so wary, and so elusive that producing a crisp photo or video of one is as difficult as spotting the bird in the first place.
Harrison numbers among the most ardent of the believers. At sixty-eight years old, the photographer returns time and again to this sliver of eastern Arkansas to try to secure an image of the bird. He’s done it before: He captured a video of an ivorybill less than three years ago.
The fast-moving bird appearing
