June 14, 2005
Goodgods and Kings
They called it the "goodgod" or the "Lord God bird"; folk etymology has it that when someone saw the ivory-billed woodpecker, they'd say, "Lord God, what a woodpecker." A wildlife artist named Don Eckelberry, painting one along the Tinsaw River in Louisiana in 1944, painted one and wrote he was "impressed by the majestic and wild personality of this bird." That bird, with "its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness," was the last ivory-billed woodpecker confirmed to be seen alive until this year. For sixty years, the Lord God bird was missing and presumed dead, despite occasional reports floating in of one seen here and there at a distance. They were the so-called Elvis sightings of ornithology. But years of intensive searching (combined with some good guesses on the part of the Nature Conservancy about what lands to buy in the hopes of preserving woodpecker habitat) paid off when a kayaker saw one in the Big Woods of Arkansas in 2004. Intensive video surveillance followed, confirming the bird's presence, and this year it was announced: Elvis had not left the building.
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