George Woodpecker Bush

If I'm caught by some electronic tracker in the perverse-seeming act of googling  "Peter Stothard and "woodpecker", it is not because I'm suffering from ornithological egomania. My aim last night was simply to track any communication relating to recent blogs on a probably (but not absolutely definitely) extinct bird from Louisiana.

This search, I can report, ended with nothing much more about the lost, picky-eating woodpeckers of the American southern swamps but did produce a different, always attractive rarity, a perceptive, entertaining and favourable review of one of one's own books which, by carelessness or failure to follow bird-calls on the web, the author has hitherto failed to spot.

Back in 2003 I wrote a diary of thirty days I had spent on a magazine assignment with Tony Blair and George W. Bush during the Iraq War. Some reviewers liked it and others thought that I had failed sufficiently to rifle the Downing Street wastepaper baskets for evidence of manufactured WMD reports and wilful war crimes.

Thirty Days had merely the modest aim of recording what one reporter heard and saw as a 'fly on the Prime Minister's wall' at a very strange time in our history. It has been much milked since for clues and colour by those analysing the war itself. But this piece in the Australian Book Review by the excellent author and publisher, Richard Walsh, catches better than anyone did what the book as a whole was about. The 'woodpecker' which led me to it last night was one (not a rare variety) originally seen in Camp David on March 27, 2003 on the roof of Laurel Cabin, the rural shack in Maryland from which presidents can peacefully fight their wars.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Having just been bludgeoned half to death by "Mesrine: Killer Instinct," I do not think that I will be able to rise off the floor
for "Tony Blair's much-hyped autobiography...more like 'a love
letter' to ex-US President George W. Bush...". (News of the World)

"The former...[PM] will shock his party and infuriate anti-war
protesters by lavishing praise on his 'highly intelligent'...friend."

"Mesrine" is forceful, but less compelling than "Birdsong: A Natural History," Don Stap: "One evening, in his house outside Ithaca, [Greg] Budney showed me the film footage Allen and Kellogg had gotten of the ivory-bill" (132-33).

"When one of the birds, clinging to the trunk of a tree, turned its
head and called, it was the bird's voice, not its image, that was
haunting."

"I heard the ivory-bill's short, single note, resembling 'the
false, high note of a clarinet'... much as Allen and Kellogg had, as if the bird were still calling more than half a century later for anyone who might be listening."

Let's have a listen to the Cornell Macaulay Library: 1.Audio #6784
Campephilus principalis Ivory-billed Woodpecker United States
Louisiana 9 April 1935 Allen, Arthur A. 10:27 2.Audio #104395
Campephilus principalis Ivory-billed Woodpecker United States
Texas 25 February 1968 Dennis, John V. 1:41.

I would be interested to know if Stap's explanation of matched countersinging--"elaborate displays of one bird matching another's series of songs note for note"--has been reconstructed for
"Ode to a Nightingale," where Keats's abstract mimicry of the
nightingale's song seems still undescribed in the literature.

Perhaps Don Kroodsma would know.

There is a fascinating entry for "duetting" in the "Oxford Dictionary of Psychology": "A series of bird calls each followed by a rapid antiphonal response from a mating partner, functioning as a recognition and bonding signal."

Unsurprisingly, "It is often mistaken for the song of a single bird, as by...Shakespeare...in ["LLL"] when he attributed 'tu-whit, tu-who' to a single staring owl."

In fact, the superstar of birds in Colman's dictionary is not the
ivory-billed or any other woodpecker. It is the barn owl, as in "auditory receptive field," "minimum audible angle," and "sound
localization." It has the true Heimdallr sensitivity. If George Bush could hear the wool growing on a sheep's back, he would not be loved by Tony Blair.

[Shelley]

"A very strange time," yes. I have a vague memory of listening to Al Franken's Air America radio show sometime during those years and hearing someone--maybe Paul Krugman?--say he felt like he was in a nightmare and trying to call out.

Not a bad metaphor for that strange time.

[Terence Hale]

A Blair that open the door
came out of the Bush with a push
With no Nellyling or Kellying
with a blair of adore cried its time for a war
With the blood of men and all problems hung-up
things looked more and more like a hold-up
history hin and history there do we really care
listening to the wind and taking to the rain
would we do it all again
With the tics of poly it has always been the same
we have to look for a new name
With a blair from the bush again
Politics seems a good name.