Free Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt Page A

Bird?
    Irresistible. Interior Secretary Norton declared that work toward habitat restoration and protection of the ivory-bill would receive $10.2 million in federal money, an astoundingly massive sum for a single species. Norton announced that the area in Arkansas where the bird was spotted would now be known as the Corridor of Hope.
    When the technical paper appeared,
Science
’s editor in chief, Donald Kennedy, wrote an editorial that quivered with excitement, an unusual public display of affection for a sober, technical journal. His mash note ended solemnly, though, casting over the entire spectacle a patriarchal prayer. Kennedy wrote: “An appropriate salutation wouldbe the ancient Hebrew blessing: ‘Baruch Mechayei haMetim: Blessed is the one who gives life to the dead.’ ”

III. A Single Spear Hits the Fortress Wall
    Like any professional group, highly credentialed ornithologists comprise a cozy ecosystem of people all pursuing the same subject. That is the essence of any such group. They meet annually as, say, the American Ornithologists’ Union and give the most eminent member the keynote address. In this small world, they may not know one another personally, but they know
of
one another. So they all simply know that, say, a professor named Jerome Jackson has always been the go-to guy for the ivory-bill or that Fitz himself made his name studying the Florida scrub-jay. And in this micro-climate of specialized professionals, the Darwinian competition among species is fairly intense and arguments about scientific evidence can often get distorted, if not collapse entirely, into battles of ego and pride. Which is why Mark Robbins, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas, at first kept his stirring concerns to himself.
    He had just returned from an overseas trip to discover America in the full grip of ivory-bill fever. The first person he spoke to was Tim Barksdale, who is a world-renown photographer of birds—“tenacious in getting the shot,” Robbins said.
    “I said, ‘Tim, did you get this on film?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ And I asked him, ‘How much time did you spend there?’ He said, ‘I spent over two hundred days, over twenty-three hundred hours.’ And I’m thinking to myself, something is wrong here. That was my first red flag.” The next day, Robbins met with some graduate students whowere very excited about the rediscovery and wanted Robbins to share in the pleasure of seeing the bird on film. To the delight of birders everywhere, Cornell Lab had posted the brief movie on their ivory-bill rediscovery website for anyone to watch.
    Almost every birder has seen a pileated woodpecker, which shares many of the ivory-bill’s traits—white panels of feathers on a different part of the wings—but its beak is nearly black and it’s somewhat smaller and it’s very, very common. “I wanted to see the film,” Robbins said, “so one guy downloads it onto his computer. I look at it and now I’m feeling sick. I’m almost at the point where I’m going to vomit on the floor because I realized that it’s a pileated woodpecker.”
    The video itself is now legendary, possibly the most studied four seconds of moving images since Abraham Zapruder filmed his home movie in Dealey Plaza. The cameraman was a computer programming professor and ivory-bill enthusiast named David Luneau. He kept a camera mounted on a central post in his canoe. And when he visited the swamp, he kept it running all the time, just in case. As it happened, his brother-in-law Robert was in the front of the canoe on this day, and the automatic focus gives us a very clear image of him. Off to one side of him, in the blurry distance, a bird startles and flies away. A non-birder would not be able to tell you if it was a woodpecker or an eagle. It’s a tiny blur of white and black, and after being blown up, it’s an even blurrier blur.
    But to a professional, the bird’s white panels permit an interpretation. To Robbins, good