Free Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt

Ornithology was in full force. Secretary Norton headed up a full-on Capitol press event. Standing on a stage backgrounded by the snapping flags of proud departments and bureaus, Norton stepped up to the podium as giddy as an Oscar-winning supporting actress. It was as if the emperor’s legions had returned from a campaign in Africa and had brought tothe seven hills the exotic spoils of the jungle—the brawny gorilla, the stealthy panther, the subdued rhinoceros. The masses were assembled and invited to gawk not so much at the bird, which wasn’t there, as at the grand power of the state and the institutions that had found this bird.
    “This is a rare second chance to preserve through cooperative conservation what was once thought lost forever,” declared Norton.
    Here, too, was a new and thoroughly contemporary character in the drama. America got to meet the modern environmentalist: John Fitzpatrick, that morning, was a man in full. In his early fifties, Fitzpatrick was ruggedly handsome enough that if it had been a few decades earlier, he’d have been recruited for a Marlboro ad. He sported a whitening brush of a mustache and just enough pink in his face to suggest a career in the woody outdoors, schooling himself in the nuances of Nature. He was a really friendly guy. His friends called him “Fitz.” And now it seemed impossible for a nation not to join them.
    “The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Fitz told us. He said they had also recorded the bird’s distinctive sounds and that seven professional ornithologists had personally spotted the bird in flight. The basic story was an adventure yarn. A kayaker named Gene Sparling had spotted the bird and blogged about it. Then, a bird journalist named Tim Gallagher read the post. With another enthusiast named Bobby Harrison, they slipped into the swamp and, in an emotional encounter, saw the bird. Gallagher returned to tell Fitz, who was convinced of the details and who launched a massive, yearlong cover operation to confirm the bird story of the century.
    For the next twenty-four hours that story was inescapable. There were three hundred thousand searches for it on Google; birding sites crashed. Cornell rushed into publication (on the Science Express website operated by the scholarly journal
Science
) the necessary peer-reviewed article to give the story the empirical imprimatur of High Truth. The scientific paper boasted seventeen acclaimed authors. In it,Cornell detailed the seven confirmed sightings of the bird by trained Cornell ornithologists. They had the video “clearly showing an ivorybill” performing its signature move—bursting off a tree in a flare of white light and flying away. There were hidden devices recording its distinctive cry, and numerous photographs of scalings—the signature marks an ivory-bill makes when it strips bark from dead trees to get at beetle larvae.
    Despite the story having leaked, Cornell managed to flood the media zone. There were 174 television programs and 43 radio shows featuring segments on the bird. Cornell launched www.ivory-bill.com , and the marketing department fired off electronic press releases to one thousand members of the media. Cornell’s press office beefed up its Washington presence. One of the authors on the scholarly article had also prepared a popular book. Tim Gallagher, the editor of Cornell’s bird periodical, had written
The Grail Bird
, now rushed into print. The only medium neglected in those first weeks was, paradoxically, opera.
    But it didn’t stop there. Add to all this effort the stunning fact that the ivory-bill was blessed by a miraculous sense of timing and coincidence. The area of Arkansas where the sightings had occurred was known, like something out of a child’s tale, as the “Big Woods.” It was spring, too, and the announcement of the bird’s resurrection came within days of Easter. And its nicknames are the Grail Bird and the Lord God