In the whole of the world the ivory-billed woodpecker is probably the most loved creature that probably doesn't exist.
Perhaps there are still a few of them deep in the Big Woods forest of eastern Arkansas when this great rap-rapping creature, also known as the Lord God woodpecker after the reaction of everyone who thinks they have seen it, was allegedly spotted by admirers in 2005. Safer perhaps to stick to the last reliable sighting made in 1944.
There are many plaintive accounts of this bird. A new one need not always be welcomed. But the book on my desk right now, from the University of Georgia, is not the usual guilt-ridden tale of of how industrialists' depradations (and the peculiarly picky panda-style feeding habits of the Lord God itself) conspired in its destruction. Instead it claims to examine how the pre-European inhabitants of America saw the ivory-billed woodpecker. Was it 'Wow, Lord God' to the Sioux or Chickasaw or just another big bird?
I'm not expecting a definitive conclusion any more than imminent sighting. But it takes me back to a talk I had in Louisiana twenty years ago with a man called the the birdman of Baton Rouge who had at that time discovered 12 wholly new species of bird more than any other person alive. John O'Neill had a drawer full of dead Lord Gods. The one whose head I was allowed to stroke was a still-bright reminder from 1887. Finding a live one was not his top priority.
O'Neill was not quite opposed to city-dwellers' attempts to undo their predecessors' crimes, to keep the Californian Condor or the Spotted Owl from following the woodpecker into extinction. He was merely sceptical of the way in which conservation has come to dominate our view of nature, worried that unless we can ``see birds properly'', the ones that do amazingly survive, we will become no more than blind zoo-keepers - and in a zoo which is all too likely to fail.
``Take the very idea of rarity,'' he began. ``There are still birds to be discovered, but there is almost no such thing as a rare bird.'' He raised his hawk-like eyes from his emu-like body in search of a suitably outraged response from his visitor. ``Nobody is prepared to look properly any more,'' he went on. According to the O'Neill view of the modern world, people would prefer birds to be rare rather than common, ideally to be endangered, best of all to be near-extinct.
O'Neill was an uncomfortable figure for an amateur bird lover or soft-hearted Audubon society member to meet. A Texan who learnt his craft on a farm outside Houston, he likes dead bodies, distrusts the ecology movement, derides most bird-watchers and is famous for his skill in skinning. In O'Neill's office, on the hot, sleepy campus of Louisiana State University, were bodily parts which recalled the cabbalistic merchandise in the nearby backstreets of New Orleans. They may have been the ritual heroes of the Chickasawas too. I'm waiting to find out from my new book by Shephard Krech III.
In his drawers lay all the proof of O'Neill's success as a bird-finder, the Orange-throated Tanager, the Cinnamon-breasted Tody-tyrant, and the eponymous Nephelornis O'Neilli: there, the Black-faced Cotinga, the Elusive Antpitta and the Ash-throated Antwren. Each was unknown until O'Neill and his colleagues found them in the mountains of South America, trapped them, shot them and turned them into dry corpses with cotton-wool eyes. Why? "Well, they are not necessarily rare, he shrugs. In fact, they are mostly quite common, if you know where to look".
His latest discovery was then the Amazonia Parrotlet, the 333rd parrot known to science. This sparrow-sized bird with a green body and a blue forehead was found on one of O'Neill's trips to the Peruvian Andes. It is the other hero of A Parrot Without a Name, the book about O'Neill which Don Stap, the poet, published in 1990. Unknown until 1989, its existence sniffed at by the conventionally wise, the parrotlet, formally named now as Nannopsittaca Dachilleae, has since become a tourist attraction.
For many years, ornithologists were little interested in new species. After all, it was said, birds are not burrowing insects. They are of an easily visible size, often brightly coloured and, damn it, they fly. As the distinguished naturalist Erwin Streseman wrote in 1951: ``Birds are the best studied of any class in the animal kingdom, and by now the number of bird species has been all but completely determined.'' The age of exploration was declared dead.
Twelve years after Streseman wrote those words, the young O'Neill found the skin of a tanager with a waxy orange throat in a Peruvian village. A few years later, he saw it in the wild and began a career which has not only transformed his own specialist area, the tropical birds of Peru, but fanned a new wave of ``ornithological optimism''. His motto is: every bird has got to be common somewhere.
He did not need to go to South America to show me what he meant. Outside his office building were giant oak trees and shrubs. ``You don't have to look far'', he said, ``to see a Rufus-sided Towhee a black-hooded bird with bright rusty flanks and red eyes but I am always being told how rare it is. The towhee is one of the commonest birds in Baton Rouge. Self-proclaimed nature lovers can't even see it under their own azalea ushes. In South and Central America, I can take you where there are Cock of the Rocks (another commonly termed rarity) by the hundreds, or Resplendent Quetzals, and easily visible Howatzins whose young have the prehistoric-looking claws that bird spotters crave so much. You just have to know where to look. A `rare bird' these days has become anything that you can't see from your car.''
