Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds by B.J. Hollars © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Prologue: Dodo Lost The Dodo used to walk around, And take the sun and air. The sun yet warms his native ground-- The Dodo is not there! The voice which used to squawk and squeak Is now for ever dumb-- Yet may you see his bones and beak All in the Mu-se-um. --Hilaire Belloc, "The Dodo," 1896 Had the birds not come searching for me, I might not have gone searching for them. But they did, one warm September afternoon, just as I sat down for lunch.
At first I mistook their tapping for a knock on the front door, but as I moved toward it, it was evident that the sound was coming from elsewhere. I returned to the table, reached for my soup, when suddenly the knocking repeated: Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap . I stood at attention, peeked out the back door, and saw nothing. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap . Turning at whiplash speed, I caught a glimpse of a small, speckled frame gripping the screen door with his claws. His tapping repeated ( Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap / Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap ), prompting me to crane my neck to get a better view. "Woodpecker," I cried to my wife and young children, bounding over baby carriers and bouncers until reaching my phone. "We got a live one here!" Twenty-first-century birder that I am (or had become in the days preceding my first conscious sighting), I clicked on my Audubon Birds Pro app, scrolling past everything between albatross and Wood Warbler before reaching the digital family of woodpeckers aglow on my screen.
Fifth on the list were the Downies, complete with a near-identical photo of the bird I''d just encountered. There he was, white bellied and red patched and just an inch or two longer than my fist. It''s you , I thought. You''re my guy . Upon peering back out the window, I learned that "my guy" was only one half of a pair. A moment later his counterpart greeted me, a female Downy who blurred past my feeder, taking refuge in the backyard birch. I didn''t quite know the protocol for what to do next. The answer, I now know, is to keep quiet and enjoy the show.
Bumbling birder that I was, I did the opposite. I clicked on the app''s audio feature, blasted "Whinny call #2" from my phone''s speaker. The recorded call bleated through the screen door and infiltrated my yard. It was enough to frighten the female back into flight, though the male--more curious than scared--momentarily observed me from his nearby roost. Our eyes locked, and then, just as quickly as he''d come, he disappeared into the trees. That was it. That was everything. The birds had called, and I''d answered.
When I first learned of extinction, I hardly learned of extinction at all. Instead, I learned of the phenomenon''s poster child, the Dodo--a flightless, feathered, football-shaped bird that by the late 1600s had marched his pigeon-like legs into oblivion. Of course, we humans paved that trail--hunting them until their numbers dwindled, then allowing an invasive species of wild pig to finish the job. In third-grade science class, we never quite got around to the finger pointing. Certainly there was no discussion of the relentless assaults by sailors and swine on the remote Mauritius Island. Instead, we at our desks were mostly content just staring at paintings of that silly-looking bird, a creature we never knew existed beyond the confines of Disney''s Alice in Wonderland . When our teacher explained to us that the Dodo was more than a movie star--that, in fact, it had once existed--her explanation managed only to spur further questions. What did she mean by "once"? I wondered.
How could something that once existed no longer exist anywhere in the world? I took my teacher''s claim as a challenge and, that very afternoon, wandered the woods behind my Indiana home in search of what hadn''t been seen in well over three hundred years. While I spotted the usual array of midwestern avian inhabitants--a preponderance of robins and finches and crows--I was surprised to find not a single Dodo among them. After an exhaustive fifteen-minute investigation, I faced facts: the Dodo, it seemed, did not live anywhere in my backyard. Which proves nothing , I decided as I tromped home for dinner that night. After all, every house on our block had a backyard--plenty of places for some silly-looking bird to hide. To say that I was in Dodo denial would be an understatement. Frankly, I was a hell-bent nine-year-old cut from the same cloth as Ahab, motivated (at least I thought) not by some deep inner turmoil but by an innate desire to prove my teacher wrong. In retrospect, I can now admit that perhaps my struggle to grasp the Dodo''s extinction was, in fact, related to my own inner turmoil; namely, my inability to come to grips with what seemed impossible, that entire species could vanish on a large scale.
If the rumors were true and the Dodo was extinct, then what prevented other species from joining them? Of course, plenty of species have--five mass extinctions'' worth--though it wasn''t until nine-year-old me began pouring over my local library''s collection of illustrated dinosaur books that I began to rethink my own Dodo-related doubt. It was one thing for some football-shaped bird to hide, but where the hell were all the dinosaurs? There was no denying it; the facts were now clear. Probably, they were hiding together. After two decades with no signs of a Dodo, I shift my search to a slightly more accessible species: the oft thought to be extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I''m well aware of my needle-in-a-haystack odds of spotting a live one, which is why I begin my search for a dead one, instead. I first meet Dr. Dana Ehret, curator of paleontology for the Alabama Museum of Natural History, at 8:00 a.m.
on a Thursday morning near the bike racks outside his office. I''d returned to my graduate school alma mater--the University of Alabama--to give a few readings, and I''d enlisted Dana''s help in tracking down an Ivory-billed Woodpecker skin. An Internet search had revealed that one might reside in the museum''s collection, though in email exchanges with Dana, he explained that the specimen''s lack of catalog number made it doubtful that our bird in question ever completed her trip to Tuscaloosa. And even if she had, given that she was collected in 1866--just a year removed from the university''s burning at the hands of the Union army--it was unlikely her carefully preserved skin had remained so on into the present day. "Still," he wrote in reply, "we can have a look." Shortly after our introduction, I follow the thirty-five-year-old bespectacled curator to the third floor of Mary Harmon Bryant Hall, at which point he leads me toward a double-wide wooden doorway. A beep and a key-turn later the doors are flung wide, revealing a concrete, temperature-controlled room, which, to my eyes, resembles the world''s most extravagant bomb shelter. "This is the collections storage area," Dana says, refuting my bomb shelter theory.
"We''ve got everything from taxidermied bears and lions to shoes and dolls. Even a shrunken head." He leads me through the compact storage shelves, opening and closing each row to reveal the array of oddities and treasures within. There''s the taxidermy row (complete with everything from black bears to barracudas), followed by the art row (portraits of naturalists and librarians, just to name a few). A bit farther down we reach the storage drawers, each of them filled with a spectrum of specimens. Dana climbs a ladder, then removes the sliding drawer featuring the woodpeckers. "So here we have our five Pileated Woodpeckers," he says, holding the drawer before me. I stare at the flock of faded specimens, each aligned neatly alongside the next.
They appear perfectly preserved, their wings folded tight to the shells of their bodies, a conga line of creatures facing beak to back. "No Ivory-bill, though," Dana admits, reaching for the nearest Pileated to search its secondary feathers for the requisite white markings and coming up short. Each bird is carefully tagged with a species type, a collection location, a date, and a catalog number. But of all the specimens we''ll see that day, we''ll find no Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Even dead, she''s managed to elude me. As consolation, Dana directs me to the mammoth tooth from Siberia ("Go ahead, you can touch it"), the fossil fractures ("Pretty cool, right?"), and finally, the collection''s rare mosasaur bones. "So what were these guys?" I ask, staring at what resembles a larger version of a crocodile skull. "Mosasaurs were marine animals that lived about seventy-five to eighty million years ago," Dana explains.
"They went extinct around the age of the dinosaurs." "What happened?" "Well, that''s a debate," he says. "Did they go out with the asteroid impact along with the other dinosaurs, or right before? We aren''t certain, but there are plenty of clues left behind." He reaches forward to touch the skull, the snout, a bit of the jaw, and then begins reading the bones like a book. He takes me back seventy-five million years, to a time when this very mosasaur darted across the ancient Alabama oceans, snagging fish between its razor-sharp teeth. "Oh, and see this?" he asks, pointing to a slight protrusion on the skull. "This looks like a healed wound. Maybe there was a fight, maybe two mosasaurs were biting each other.
" I.