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    • MJ Andersen: The mystery of variety -- A rare bird returns

    01:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 13, 2005

    I HAVE NEVER really understood birders. As a child in the rural Midwest, I could identify only two flying species: in town, robins; in the country, red-winged blackbirds. Now and then a pheasant crossed the road. (Chickens were under house arrest on the farm, and stayed put.)

    Two other birds I knew by sound: I would sometimes hear the prayerful cooing of mourning doves. And early on summer mornings, before the wind rose, I could hear the bird that sings fee-bee; fee-bee. But I never saw these birds, that I knew of, or tried to picture them.

    The ivory-billed woodpecker is a Southern bird. Its call has been compared to the noise a toy trumpet makes, and to a high clarinet squawk. The ivory bill also manages a sharp drumming into dead trees. These harbor the bugs that keep it alive, unless, of course, you cut the trees down.

    Until recently, no one had verifiably heard or seen the ivory-billed woodpecker for 60-odd years. Then one day a man kayacking in Arkansas noticed what his eyes told him could not be: a male ivory bill was flying straight at him. Seconds later, North America's largest woodpecker, so magnificent it was sometimes called the "Lord God bird," was sitting in a nearby tree.

    ("Lord God" is what people were said to blurt out on seeing this bird; if named today, the ivory bill would probably be our ohmigod bird.)

    Others rushed to confirm the kayaker's February 2004 sighting, succeeding seven times and even capturing the bird on a blurry bit of videotape. Two weeks ago the discovery was made official, with a paper published in the journal Science. Birders have been in a state of euphoria ever since.

    Strong emotion seems braided into every part of this story. Shortly after his initial encounter, the kayaker, Arkansas resident Gene Sparling, set out with two ornithologists to find the bird again, in the same swamp.

    When an ivory bill did indeed fly past the searchers' canoe, one of them, Bobby Harrison, of Oakwood College in Alabama, began to sob. The other, Cornell University's Tim Gallagher, reported being unable to utter so much as a syllable, let alone the words "Lord God."

    Despite sporadic hunts by devoted birders, the ivory-billed woodpecker had been given up as extinct many years before. In 2002, a very intensive search through thousands of acres in Louisiana turned up nothing.

    The ivory bill's habitat once spread from the Carolinas and Florida through a band all the way west to Texas. But over the years, logging destroyed much of it; by the 1930s, the bird could be found only in small pockets of Southern forest. Until Sparling saw what he was not sure he saw, the last documented sighting had been in 1944.

    The ivory bill appears in one of John James Audubon's most notable illustrations. By his and all other accounts, it is one striking woodpecker. The bird stands nearly two feet tall and has a 30-inch wingspan. The male, with a red crest and an intent, beady eye, is robed in formal-wear black and white.

    The big question now is whether more than one ivory bill exists, and whether there are enough to procreate. For what if Sparling's is the last ivory bill in the world? The permanent loss once symbolized by this bird could in fact occur -- and again be symbolized.

    If so, not only birders will mourn. Birders may have their own special communion with winged creatures; the variations in color, habit, and song seem to feed something essential in these people. But if the rest of us have limited patience with binoculars, we do respond to the idea of permanent loss.

    Why the earth features so much variety is an age-old mystery. But at some level we know ourselves to be stewards of this variety. And so, lest we lose our souls, we try to create wilderness preserves, in the hope that they will somehow accomplish some unquantifiable good. Obviously not everyone is on board. But polls show that most Americans, at least in theory, are environmentalists.

    Sparling found his ivory bill in Arkansas's Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. In a recent New York Times piece, science writer James Gorman movingly argued that the discovery proves these preservation efforts have not been foolish or in vain. And that, he reasons, is why even non-birders felt such emotion on hearing that the ivory-billed woodpecker still lives.

    Nevertheless, the larger question remains: Is variety going the way of the dodo bird? Can multifaceted nature endure, or will we humans finally crowd it out?

    Lately, people have not felt especially hopeful. News of the ivory bill arrived like an unexpected bulletin from a war. Here was a battlefield exception, a rare victory amid what had mainly been grim news. You do not need to have worked out an idea of God to experience such a moment as grace.

    To me though, the ivory bill story is not just one of how badly the world needs its rare birds, or even of how much humanity needs forgiveness, or a second chance. It is also about how sorely the world needs birders.

    I am not like the birders -- not like the botanists, the shell collectors and rock hounds who can find a universe in one small piece of nature. But their love for the earth's particulars enriches me and reminds me to pay attention. When a man weeps at a flash of piebald wing, the world is with him.

    M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal's editorial board.

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