Via Negativa

August 5, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

From Ground Zero

Buddha statue partially melted by the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Photo by Hiromi Tsuchida.

Much has been written about the premeditated nature of the atomic bomb attacks, the extent to which Hiroshima and Nagasaki functioned as laboratories for testing the effects of this horrifying new weapon. The official justification for America’s use of atomic bombs – that it would hasten the end of the war – never made much sense. But then, little about war ever does.

The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan’s messages had been intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…” Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: “Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to – and did – relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion.”

– Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

What makes the bombings even more cynical, to me, is that their actual targets, however carefully preserved for the purpose, were wholly incidental. The real, political target of the blasts was the Soviet Union, which had been set to enter the Pacific War on August 8. We could’ve dropped the bombs anywhere, really. In the minds of the military planners, the victims were complete ciphers – zeros, like the fighter planes deployed by the Japanese with such devastating effect. But Japan was the most logical direct target for the new weapon, because the European war was over, and several years of successful propaganda portraying Japanese as uniquely reptilian and fanatical had prepared the U.S. population to accept the official rationale.

Two events associated with World War II in the Pacific virtually obliterated the distinction between combatant and noncombatant, that fragile distinction at the heart of international efforts of the last five centuries to regulate the conduct of war and restrict human and environmental destruction. These were:
– The Japanese onslaught against the peoples of China and Southeast Asia as exemplified by the bombing of Shanghai, the rape of Nanking, and the attacks on civilians as in the “three-all policy” (burn all, kill all, destroy all) directed against rural North China.
– The use of air strikes by the major powers to terrorize and destroy cities and their populations, notably in the firebombing of European and Japanese cities and the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The common element linking these events, directing the awesome technological might of modern war against combatant and noncombatant alike, denied the humanity of enemy populations and legitimated their wholesale annihilation.

– Mark Selden, “Introduction,” The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ed. by Kyoko Selden and Mark Selden

* * *

I visited Hiroshima in 1986. Here’s a prose poem that came out of that visit.

HIROSHIMA MEMORIAL

We dropped our duffle at the youth hostel and hustled over to Ground Zero at the Peace Park, the Atomic Bomb Dome – it’s most striking at sunset, they told us. We took care to speak in hushed tones. I was thinking, we Americans are so weird, we take pictures of things you wouldn’t even want to pose in front of. I was thinking, a botched mastectomy. An unfinished stupa. The next morning, in broad daylight, the dome looked sort of lonely, despite the constant stream of tourists that kept circling it. I overheard an Australian say, “If you wanna make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.”

“Remember Hiroshima!” the guardians of national conscience intone, as if this thriving port on a poisoned sea were nothing but a mirage, the real city a platonic Idea translated aloft by Little Boy’s flash. But if that were true, there would be no possibility of speech, tears, atonement, anything. Reduced to stuttering silence like Schoenberg’s Moses, who could resist that Burning, with its final Word?

“But we’re innocent!” the cry goes up – on both sides of the Pacific. To be sure: we were naive, my girlfriend & I. I remember what clarity, unnumbed, could come from shock. Like the vajra in esoteric Buddhism, a double-sided thing, both sudden & impenetrable. I remember how an hour in the museum faced by photo after gruesome photo made us afraid to touch or even catch the other’s eye. And despite our leftist posturing, how really all-American we must’ve been, so typical in our assumption of bedrock national virtue, our proprietary interest in all the military exploits fit to print in a high school history text. When a peace activist confronted us by the Paper Crane Shrine we said Yes – Yes – to each of his accusations. We were twenty years old. The world would have to change.

And Hiroshima? A twinge of guilt still interposes when I recall our lightheartedness the rest of that rainy weekend, as silly and self-involved as only a young couple can be. Forced by poor planning and empty pockets to wander the city all Sunday long, we took turns posing for comic snapshots in front of the city’s unofficial memorials: coffee shops and noodle bars, concrete levees hiding riverside bicycle dumps, playgrounds given over to great yellow monkey-bar castles, a backstreet Shinto shrine where the cedars were already big enough to merit their own collars of sacred rope.

* * *

My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) – that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.

Howard Zinn, op. cit.

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the rise of the United States to world domination. On these days of remembrance and introspection, let us pray that the end of empire come soon and be as painless as possible. Let us renew our commitment to bring about in our own lives and through our relationships with others a world where coercive social structures win no allegiance and war is unthinkable.
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I encourage those who may be skeptical about the ability of violent societies to become peaceful to check out two scholarly articles recently added to my father’s Peaceful Societies website: “The Peace Puzzle in Ufipa” (review here) and “‘Respect for the Rights of Others Is Peace’: Learning Aggression Versus Nonaggression among the Zapotec” (review here).

August 4, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Milk teeth

Early morning – still cool – of another day that will test the limits of comfort. A rending of bark from the woods’ edge draws my gaze to three moving portions of darkness, the mother bear & two of her cubs visible for half a minute before they disappear up into the laurel.

My heart leaps. I wonder again how it is that we can love such fierce strangers as these, our fellow inhabitants? But how can we not? My brother’s baby daughter Elanor, focus of so much doting attention, already has three bears of her own: a pink plastic one that squeaks loudly when squeezed, a plush panda doll, & a brown teddy bear with a sewn-on smile & the words “cuddly lovable” stitched right into its chest. When the left paw is brought to the mouth, it makes a kissing noise.

Elanor has learned to signal pleasure through noisy spitting – a bilabial trill, as her linguist daddy calls it: “a sound that every baby knows, but which is not represented phonemically in any of the world’s languages.” One sees already in a six-month-old baby how strong and how literal is the thirst for knowledge. Barely able to crawl, her reach still far exceeds her grasp, and the object of every grasping is to mouth, to slobber on, & if possible, to ingest. Grasping the link between mouth-sounds & the stimulation of mutual pleasure among the rest of us, she bubbles over with effusive joy.

It’s encouraging to think that the urge to give back should be so basic. Only the bottom row of milk teeth have broken the surface, but already I am anticipating the sharp shards of language. I’m waiting to see how real knowledge of love is acquired: does it sprout like teeth from the jaw, ready to bite? Or does it need to be sharpened against increasingly fine permutations of joy & rage? And what age will she be, I wonder, when that caricature of an animal intended solely to ease her passage through the night acquires a personality of its own?

It can’t be long. I almost remember the bear of my own infant imagination, feeling a heat in its haunches, a quick rhythm in its chest. Its breath becoming a black sun, hot on the back of the neck. And then the tug of something like a comb, a wordless harrow through hair standing suddenly at attention.

August 4, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Words on the street

Hat-tip: Charles Simic.

August 3, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Multiple

The problem with stories is that they never tell the whole truth. For every god you invite to the feast, there’s a demon that needs to be driven out of the kitchen. I am reading a love story, a book about a woman with multiple personality syndrome and the therapist who treats her, and I’m thinking: this is how we should try to love the land, honoring each strand of myth. Wilderness might be the core personality, but there’s always a small piece of garden, too, beholden to its stern angel with flaming sword. After the wildfire, seeds dormant for a hundred years can have their brief day in the sun: blackberries, fireweed, fire cherries. A tree near timberline abandons its assault on the sky and goes crawling on multiple bellies, out of the wind. A plant or animal set down in a new land, freed of its former constraints, can be fruitful and multiply beyond all reason. Or one can find a sudden dearth of fossils, for example in the very stratum where my house sits: a story line cut short by some unimaginable horizon.

How to make one journey out of so many roads and trails, hikes cut short by thunderstorms or insufficient daylight? How to get past the chasms, the time lost in suspensions of disbelief? We climb as high as the land lets us, taking in as much as we can in a single glance. We fantasize about a sudden plunge, overtaking our shadows, following green rivers to their source. Charley Patton is singing on the car stereo, his hoarse voice deliberately slurring the words:

I see a river rollin’ like a log
I wade up Green River, rollin’ like a log
I wade up Green River, Lord, rollin’ like a log

Through the pops and hisses on the old recording we can barely make out the guitar’s crisp weave of voices, a three-minute fraction of a song that might’ve lasted half an hour live. On another track, Patton talks back to himself as the guitar plays all sides of a single chord: oh, that spoonful! Unspoken after the first line, the ——– hangs just out of reach. The next day, before we leave, we’ll stop along the road where the birthwort sends its runners into the oaks, and I’ll use a walking stick to knock down one of the fluted, green pods. It will take pride of place in the well in front of the gearshift, rolling like a log on the long ride home.

August 2, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Traveler’s joy

More notes from last week’s trip to West Virginia.

Below the pulloff for the roadside view, the vine called traveler’s joy sprawls over the rocks.

A wood lily rocks gently in the wind, doors thrown open to all six points of the compass.

Yellow birch: the straight & narrow path is never dull.

Ground beetles take the place of dinosaurs in a forest within the forest where flowering plants are still a distant rumor.

Rank & deadly, false hellebore raises a green panicle above leaves already half-dead, turning color for no one.

On the summit where we found snow in late October, fireweed blooms against the spruce.

August 2, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Words on the street

August 2, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Ivorybill update: hearing IS believing!

My newspaperman friend and fellow blogger Alan forwarded me this story from today’s Science Times (the only part of the New York Times that’s too important to miss). Readers of my review of Tim Gallagher’s book will remember that I couldn’t understand why the skeptics weren’t convinced by the audio recordings. Now, it seems, a new set of audio recordings from the White River National Wildlife Refuge has persuaded two out of the three scientists who had authored a paper questioning the rediscovery to withdraw their objections. (The third is out of the country and hasn’t had the opportunity to hear the new tapes yet.)

Even more exciting is the fact that these newly released recordings clearly feature a pair of ivorybills. The immense White River NWR appears to harbor a breeding population of ivorybills, just as Gallagher and his friend Bobby Harrison always suspected.

“We felt all along that the White River was probably the core of the bird’s habitat and it was dispersing out,” said Sam Hamilton, the Southeast regional director for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and chairman of a panel overseeing the drafting of a recovery plan for the bird.

The scientific consensus on the strength of the sound recordings from that region was “very, very exciting,” Mr. Hamilton said. “It gives you chill bumps to think about that vast bottomland hardwood being certainly home to more than one bird.”

This is a real vindication for the Cornell Lab and for the audio-birding techniques that its specialists have pioneered. I imagine they’ll have their hands full now with requests to help set up recording stations in every likely forest from the Carolinas to east Texas.
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Incidentally, according to my brother Mark, who teaches at Delta State University right across the Mississippi from the White River NWR, birders should not feel that they should stay away in order to protect the woodpeckers. The swamps where the ivorybills hang out are pretty much impenetrable anyway, but just to be on the safe side, the Fish and Wildlife Service has set up limited-access reserves and has designated areas just outside their boundaries where birders might have a chance of seeing or hearing an ivorybill. (Recall that several sightings were made right from Interstate 40.) And the friendly folks in rural Arkansas can use your tourist dollars. They have generally gone along with the state’s decision to support large-scale conservation efforts and to push hunting, fishing and ecotourism to “the Natural State,” so it’s only appropriate that we show our gratitude by paying them a visit. I’m planning to go down in November.

August 1, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Two ways at once

Last week my friend L. & I spent some time in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest – our third visit in less than a year.

We take our umbrellas walking, slower & slower.

I hear springs gurgling under the rocks. Small, dark pools appear among the rhododendrons. In one, a red maple leaf floats, already orange with autumn; the surface of another is covered with hemlock needles – tiny green rafts going nowhere.

We overtake a snail traveling in the same direction, gliding along under its spiral backpack.

Rain rarely reaches us unmediated by trees. The sun can come out long before rain has finished dripping from the leaves. As slowly as I walk, my glasses still fog up every time I stop.

The already wet trail grows wetter. One rock hisses under my boot.

We stop for lunch – instant ramen – and a spot of tea. I set my tin cup in the creek to cool, keeping watch to make sure the rhododendrons don’t drop a blossom in it.

With thunder rumbling in the distance, we dangle bare feet in the water. I watch a pair of crayfish battling a few feet away. The loser scuttles over & gives my ankle several exploratory taps.

I watch water flowing around a large rock, its translucent body a net of shadows as it folds back against itself. After ten minutes or so, I think I might understand something fundamental about water, its impetus to condense, to fall, to plumb the depths. But then I glance just a few feet to the left & am completely flummoxed by a large drift of foam. I had forgotten about tannins. The water is never just one thing, I think.

The storm breaks. Tree trunks become rivers flowing in two directions at once, outside & in.

On the way back, I stop to eye a large hemlock with limbs like reverse mouths for the sun. The tree reveals itself as a condensation of need, or needs. (Who knows if all aspirations can be reduced to a single breath?) Things turn inside out before my astonished gaze. With each footstep, I realize, we are helping to hold down an insurgent earth.

What I am calling need might be a kind of thirst or hunger, but it seems risky to try & grasp it through analogy with human desires, which are so wrapped up in surfaces. The non-human world seems much more rooted & constrained by custom. And what these others lose in flexibility they gain in the directness of their access to what we call the divine. For them, there is no gap whatsoever between spirit & matter.

A torrent of thoughts under my umbrella: Every element of Creation seeks redemption from its uncreatedness, its just-so-ness; death & decomposition represent only a temporary setback. Life is continual recomposition.

The life force, for lack of a better term, consists not merely of need but the energetic field surrounding it, which helps forge connections between beings. To feel those connections deeply is intoxicating – or, more accurately, leads to something like a contact high.

Spirituality is almost beside the point, considering that the body is already a temple and the digestive system is the most perfect altar imaginable. From the belly’s faithful service we can learn the art of letting go, a kind of sympathetic magic aimed at getting other things to let go of us. However hungry it may be, the panther knows better than to try & sever the jugular of a mountain stream.

Done scribbling, I glance up from my pocket notebook. An open space under the hemlocks is illuminated by a single, fist-sized clump of rhododendron blossoms. “What are you writing?” L. asks. “Oh, silly stuff,” I answer truthfully.

A half-mile farther, another open grove shimmers with the endlessly supple song of a winter wren. A second thunderstorm rumbles in the distance. The sky grows dark.

An hour later, we’re back at camp. I’ve carried my folding camp chair over to a house of boulders, where I sit admiring the arrangement of space & the spill of light where it opens to the sky. The boulders are green with moss, & each is capped with a dozen or more large, leathery ears of rock tripe. The resident hermit thrush draws near, playing his crystal flute. For several long moments I feel confirmed in whatever it is I’ve been trying all afternoon to intuit. Then a fly buzzes through without even slowing down – zoom. It is the most thorough & devastating refutation I can imagine.

And if you think the world is recalcitrant now, I say to myself, wait until you’re in your 80s.

I go looking for my hiking partner & find her sitting under another rock shelter, spying on the forest road below. I return to camp & start on supper. Later, she tells me that when a pickup truck finally did drive by, she couldn’t look.

July 31, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The outhouse poet strikes again

We are very different writers, he & I.
He uses the point of a nail clipper
to etch his angular letters where they’ll reach
the broadest possible audience. Paper
is what you wipe with, says he.
Me, I revere the dirt beneath my nails
as if it were the dust of my ancestors,
which it might well be. Nature abhors
a pit, say I. We are all connected.

The shithouse poet only gets the urge to write
when he gets the urge. Sometimes his muse
is loosened by 24-hour news-mongering
on the fear channel. Squatting over the void,
hole to hole, he vents in rhyme.

Me, I make my own buzz,
rub my forefeet together for warmth.
If you didn’t know any different,
you might think I was praying.
You might take this windowless house for a hermit’s cell.

July 30, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Doubting against doubt: finding the grail bird

Here’s a book review to wrap up Summer Book Week. Thanks are due to my father for posting (and copyediting) in my absence, and to him, my mom and my brother for sharing their expertise in “favorite books” posts.

I try hard to avoid anything topical at Via Negativa, but as regular readers will remember, I made an exception for the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, announced late last April. In company with a lot of other folks, I saw it as a real emblem of hope – maybe ecocide can still be averted. Maybe there’s still time.

Since then, one of the most pivotal re-discoverers, Tim Gallagher, has had his book published by Houghton Mifflin, The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. This was no instant book, but had been in the works for some time; an epilogue gives an update as of February 2005. And Gallagher, the editor of Living Bird magazine, is no slouch as a writer.

Mostly, The Grail Bird is just a good yarn, filled with engaging portraits of the various characters who have stalked the bird for science, from the 18th century to the present. I hadn’t realized the extent to which scientists had helped decimate the last surviving populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through their insatiable urge to collect. The attitude of ornithologists toward birds was strikingly similar to the attitude of early anthropologists toward the “primitive” people they studied: gather all the hard evidence possible, including corpses, because of course their continued existence is incompatible with human progress. The role of the scientist was to document the march of rare species and indigenous peoples toward extinction. But while the mainstream of anthropology has long since repudiated this truly primitive mindset, evidence suggests that ornithologists are having a great deal of trouble accommodating any other storyline.

The real hero of the book is Gallagher’s good friend and fellow ivorybill fanatic Bobby Harrison, a roly-poly Southerner with an insatiable hunger for Snickers bars and Dinty Moore beef stew and an uncanny penchant for taking the long way around, whether on foot in snake-infested swamps or traveling cross-county in his beater of a van. It’s Harrison, along with Arkansas natives David Luneau and Gene Sparling, who maintains a constant vigil in the swamp. Wave after wave of crack birders from Cornell and elsewhere spend varying lengths of time in the area trying to collect solid documentary evidence of the Ivorybill’s existence, but in the end it’s the fanatical Harrison and Luneau who come up with the brief, blurry videos that remain the most solid evidence to date (if one discounts the excellent audio recordings of ivorybill calls from several locations).

The Grail Bird ought to appeal to a much wider audience than just birders. The story of the ivorybill’s repeated rediscovery and subsequent dismissal by legions of skeptics throughout the latter half of the 20th Century left me pondering the nature of doubt. Ever since the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, we have been accustomed to regarding unquestioning faith as problematic; I can’t remember ever hearing a critique of “blind doubt.” But following the crushing loss of the Singer Tract in the 1940s, the American ornithological community has fallen prey to a fey kind of fatalism in regards to the ivorybill. No proof is good enough, and any ornithologist so foolhardy as to claim to have seen it – or even to believe in the veracity of a sighting – risks irreparable damage to his reputation.

That was the case with John Dennis, who had taken what was generally acknowledged as the last irrefutable photo of an ivorybill in Cuba in 1948. His claim to a sighting in the Big Thicket of East Texas in 1966 was roundly ridiculed. With Harrison’s help, Gallagher is able to relocate a sound recording Dennis had made, and the analysis of the sonogram convinced audio technicians that the call on the tape could only have been made by an ivorybill.

In another coup of investigative journalism, Gallgher tracked down the previously unknown individual who took the controversial snapshots of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana in 1971. The then-head of the Louisiana State Museum of Natural Science, George Lowery, had presented the snapshots at the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Union that year and was astonished at his colleagues’ reactions.

Lowery’s pictures were met with immediate withering skepticism by most of the other ornithologists. The photos showed two different trees, but the posture of the bird in them was too similar. You couldn’t see its bill or feet. Somehow, it just didn’t look right. And yet the question remained: why would someone go to all the trouble of climbing fifty or sixty feet up two different trees to fake these pictures – particularly since the man who took them wished to remain anonymous?

In this case, the skeptical reaction appears especially unscientific. Not only did the skeptics’ explanation fail to satisfy Occam’s razor, but their refusal to even entertain the possibility that a population of ivorybills persisted in an area with extensive tracts of suitable habitat, as attested to by a well-respected biologist, was the very opposite of the open-minded search for truth that is the supposed hallmark of Western science.

Gallagher and Harrison are among the dedicated few who never allowed themselves to believe that the ivorybill had gone extinct. It’s not that they were ever fully convinced that the bird still existed, simply that they refused to dismiss what struck them as convincing accounts by credible witnesses. They dared to “doubt against doubt,” as it were. Significantly, neither is a professional ornithologist. Each is an amateur in the best sense of the word: etymologically, a lover, someone passionately dedicated to a pursuit. Of course, plenty of scientists are also passionate advocates for the natural world: one thinks of E. O. Wilson, Reed Noss, Michael Soulé. Without true passion to burn off the choking thickets of fatalism, I wonder, can the mind ever find room for dispassionate analysis?

It’s not that Gallagher doesn’t understand where the skeptics are coming from. He gives a very sympathetic portrait of one of his colleagues at the Lab, Kevin McGowan, whom he describes as “the resident skeptic.” For McGowan, it seems, a bird in the hand is worth a hundred in the bush.

He wants to see empirical evidence for everything. This may be because he was the curator of Cornell’s bird collection for a long time and is used to dealing with evidence that you can see or touch, such as bird specimens. He is careful and precise, and if he says he saw something, there is little doubt that he did. …[H]e has less than perfect vision. He is obsessed with visual clarity to such an extent that he insists on only real glass lenses in his eyeglasses, not plastic, despite the extra weight.

After seeing Luneau’s video, McGowan is finally convinced.

“I wanted to believe before,” he told me. “But it’s in my nature to be skeptical. I just couldn’t help but have doubts, even though I trusted the abilities of some of the people who’d had sightings. It wasn’t until I saw David Luneau’s video that I really accepted the existence of this bird.”

Seeing, as they say, is believing; everything else is hearsay, even the best audio recordings. This attitude is especially curious in a field where identification by human or electronic ear is more and more heavily relied upon to verify the presence of breeding or migrating birds. Cornell Lab has taken a leading role in promoting this kind of research, as well as enlisting legions of amateur birders as so-called citizen scientists for all kinds of studies, so it is only appropriate that the Lab should’ve led the ivorybill rediscovery effort. But even the Lab’s best people are not immune to the debilitating influence of irrational disbelief. Gallagher recalls interviewing one of the searchers, woodpecker expert Dr. Mindy LeBranche, on the evening of the day when she had a good, clear sighting.

I was annoyed that so many people were throwing out percentages about how sure they were that they had seen an ivory-bill. Ron and David were maybe 85 percent sure; Jim Fitzpatrick was 98.5 percent sure; now here was Mindy saying she was 99 percent sure of her sighting.

“What’s all this crap I keep hearing about people being 90 percent sure, 95 percent sure that they saw an ivory-bill?” I said. “What is it about your sighting that gives you that one percent of doubt?”

Mindy shot right back: “Because the bird is freaking extinct! For years I’ve been convinced of that. And that’s why I can’t be a hundred percent sure.”

As we spoke, I left the camcorder running, and it was still taping for a while after the interview was over. When I played it back later, it was interesting to watch the expressions on her face while conversations went on all around her. People were laughing and joking nearby, and she would occasionally laugh along with them, throwing out a comment or two. But every time she stopped talking, she would withdraw into herself. Her face at times looked almost horror-struck, almost like that of a person in shock – or perhaps like someone who has…well, seen a ghost.

Just in the past week, the news media have gleefully seized upon reports that a number of prominent birders and ornithologists are increasingly willing to air their doubts about the rediscovery. An article challenging the evidence is scheduled to appear in an as-yet unnamed journal, with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. The New York Times quotes two prominent birders, David Allen Sibley and Kenn Kaufman, questioning the reliability of the evidence collected to date. Both have recently authored best-selling bird guides, and both took the unprecedented step of excluding the ivory-billed woodpecker. So for the damned bird to reappear just after they had literally written it off is a bit of an embarrassment, to say the least. (Sibley subsequently uploaded a PDF file of an insertable ivorybill page at his website.) As for the scientists,

“The people who originally announced this thoroughly believe they got an ivory-billed woodpecker,” said Mark B. Robbins of the University of Kansas, one of the three scientists preparing the challenge to the Science report. “They believe one thing, we believe another. This is how science plays out, the fabric of science getting at the truth.”

Except that in this case, the fabric of science appears to be a funeral shroud. As my brother Steve recently remarked, when did it become unscientific to assume that a species is still present until the last acre of suitable habitat is completely eliminated? There’s a kind of arrogance at work here that says that since we can’t find something, it must not be there. But do we really know where and how to look? Considering that the Cuban subspecies depends on pine forests rather than bottomland swamps, it’s clear that our knowledge of the ivorybill’s habitat preferences and adaptability is miniscule.

Sibley reviewed The Grail Bird for the Boston Globe last month. Though he says he liked the book otherwise, he takes strong exception to Gallagher’s critique of the scientific community. “[T]rue science, objective and unbiased, has to be based on concrete, testable evidence. Since 1944 there has been no conclusive evidence to go along with the sightings,” Sibley intones. At this point, though, I wonder if the doubters would be satisfied with anything less than a corpse.
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See also Learning from the ivorybill, The finding and The thing with feathers.