The Race to Save the Lord God Bird Read Online Free Page B

atmosphere that nearly suffocates the intruder in the meridian heat of our dogdays in those gloomy and horrible swamps!

    On December 20, 1820, they gunned down an Ivory-bill in a swamp forest near the junction of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. Though its wing was broken, it tried to survive, playing dead at the base of a tree until the approaching footsteps drew too near. Then “it Jumped up and climbed a tree fast as a squirel to the very top …
Joseph [Mason] came and saw it—Shot at it and brought him down.” It was the first of several Ivory-bills they would kill that winter. Audubon admired the bird’s magnificent spirit even as it was dying: “They sometimes cling to the bark with their claws so firmly, as to remain cramped to the spot for several hours after death.”

    JOSEPH MASON
    Before he took off to roam the land, Audubon taught French and painting to boys at a Cincinnati school he established. One who answered Audubon’s advertisement for students was a widower, the father of a boy who seemed to like to draw. The boy, Joseph Mason, enrolled in Audubon’s classes, and soon astonished Audubon by his ability to draw plants—exactly what Audubon needed. He made a deal with Joseph’s father. If Joseph could travel with him for a year, Audubon would give him painting lessons.
    Before long, Audubon wrote to his wife that Joseph “now draws Flowers better than any man probably in America, though Knowest I do not flatter young artists much. I never said this to him, but I think so.” Joseph Mason painted the backgrounds to fifty of the bird portraits in Audubon’s famous series The Birds of America.

    Later, Audubon withdrew three Ivory-bill specimens from his bag—an adult male, an adult female, and a juvenile male—combed their feathers, and attached thin wires to their wings and limbs. Like a puppeteer he pulled the feathers and toes into dramatic positions that would illustrate the character of these birds. This made them look much more lively and revealing than the stiff poses Alexander Wilson had painted. By manipulating the birds, Audubon could show them in flight, or feeding young, or fluffing up their feathers—whatever seemed most natural. To make sure he got the proportions right, he placed each bird against a wire grid of tiny squares and drew his first sketches on grid paper that had squares of corresponding size. Audubon made three drawings and paintings of the Ivory-bill. The one that became best known showed three woodpeckers vigorously stripping the bark from a dead cypress tree in search of food. As Audubon sketched and painted his specimens and wrote detailed descriptions of the magnificent birds, he seemed to be worrying about the species. Was it doomed? He had seen settlers clear the frontier forests of the Alleghenies and the Ohio Valley, and he must have known that southern trees couldn’t be far behind. Of more pressing concern, the Ivory-bill’s appearance and behavior made it attractive to hunters and easy to find. Audubon wrote:

    [Their calls] are heard so frequently that … the bird spends few minutes a day without uttering them; and this circumstance leads to its destruction … not because this species is a destroyer of trees but more because it is a beautiful bird, and its rich scalp attached to the upper mandible forms an ornament for the war-dress of most of our Indians, or for the shot-pouch of our squatters
and hunters, by all of whom the bird is shot merely for that purpose.

    Something about the bill’s whiteness made it seem magical to whites and Indians alike. Some Native Americans thought possessing it gave them the bird’s mighty power. Mark Catesby, a British naturalist who explored the American South between 1712 and 1725, saw warriors wearing headdresses of white bills strung with “the points outward.” The heads were prized objects of trade. “Northern Indians,”