Bunch of Amateurs (9 page)

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 would
be the ancient Hebrew blessing: ‘Baruch Mechayei haMetim: Blessed is the one who gives life to the dead.’ ”

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 who
were 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 science requires that you make the most likely interpretation: “The proportion of white to black on this bird can’t be the dorsal of the ivory-bill,” Robbins told his grad students that day. “We pulled our specimen,” he said, “and sure enough it didn’t fit and everybody is going, ‘Holy shit.’ ”

Robbins kept this skepticism to himself but only for a day, at which point his old officemate Rick Prum called. Prum had since moved on to Yale (and he’s a neighbor of mine now), but he and Robbins maintained their old water-cooler chats by phone. And without so much as
a howdy-do about Robbins’s overseas trip, “Rick was right off the bat with ‘What do you think about this ivory-billed proof?’ ”

Turns out Prum had seen what Robbins saw—a pileated. Still, it seemed crazy to question it since there was so much other proof—the numerous sightings by professionals, the telltale bark scalings, and other evidence. Yet by the end of the conversation, Robbins and Prum felt compelled to make the scientific case, especially about the ambiguity of the video. They would prepare a paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal, in this case,
Public Library of Science Biology
.

This was how we are all taught science is supposed to work. Data and conclusions get set down, then presented to other people in the field to review (or duplicate), and then those peer reviewers give the paper a thumbs-up or -down to publication. This idea of peer review is what makes science different from other forms of truth construction. Originally, the scientific method might have been an effort to keep the language of miracles and faith and Scriptural Authority out of observations and conclusions. But now we understand that it’s also meant to scrub secular flaws as well—logical holes, rhetorical leaps, insistence based on seniority or ego.

As he and Robbins wrote the paper and finished it, I got a call from Prum. He was asking me for advice about how to get the word out about his paper. I immediately told him of my own failed involvement in the story so far and, frankly, was excited to hear that there was a controversy. Again, my magazine deadlines would not be fast enough, and it hardly mattered. Just before they were set to publish, Prum and Robbins received a call from an acquaintance inside the Cornell lab who had heard about their upcoming article. She warned them that Cornell had put audio machines throughout the woods and were still analyzing the numerous calls and knocks picked up on the tapes, but that the sound prints looked like the rock-solid evidence everyone wanted. And yet, in the paper, Cornell refused to say anything about the sounds other than that they were “suggestive but not proof.” Prum and Robbins were permitted to hear the audio
and compare it to the soundtrack of the only film of ivory-bills made in 1935, shot by a legendary ornithologist named Arthur Allen, then also the director of the Cornell lab.

The recordings convinced Prum and Robbins that while they might be right about the video specifically, perhaps they were being too impetuous about the general claim. So they did what scientists are supposed to do. Faced by better evidence, they held their article. Given the fame of the bird by now, Prum and Robbins’s retraction itself became national news.

I remember Prum called me the day this happened. I was on my cell and stood in my driveway. Prum talks fast to begin with, but he was a flywheel that afternoon. The words zipped by. He said he was pulling his paper because that is what good scientific method mandated. But he was also saying that he still didn’t believe the video. It was an important distinction but one I felt helpless telling him would never survive the blunt instrument that is our national media. Indeed, within hours, the whole story became a parable about a failed attempt to bring down Cornell. But it was much weirder than that. For the time being, the bird existed in the most bizarre way. Prum and Robbins believed the video showed nothing, while Cornell said it showed an ivory-bill. And Cornell pooh-poohed its own sound recordings as “suggestive,” while the other ornithologists considered them compelling.

When John Fitzpatrick ascended to the podium at the annual meeting to the American Ornithologists’ Union, it was as if Perry had returned
from the North Pole or Armstrong from the moon. All honor and glory would be showered upon Fitz.

In his career, he was known as the scrub-jay guy, but he’d also become famous as a
packager
of birds. At various organizations in his career, he had shown that he could unite conservation mascots—photogenic birds, for instance—with money from mega-donors and the sweat equity of well-intentioned environmental groups to create massive partnerships. The work on the ground was carried out by the do-gooders, while the backers were welcome to proclaim their public virtue and the two “synergized” to get the hard work done. His most famous achievement—a bird program called Partners in Flight—says it all in the title.

The stage for the annual meeting was massive, with a huge dropdown screen, and was set perfectly for the arrival of the great man. Sure, there had been a peep of controversy with Prum and Robbins, but that was over now. Fitz was prepping himself for the history books. You know that scientists are thinking about history books when they dare to use religious metaphors—as Stephen Hawking did in the last line of his
A Brief History of Time
, about how science will “know the mind of God.”

Fitz’s own words were solemnly quoted as if he’d already ascended to the great canopy and sitteth on the right hand of John James Audubon: “These woods are my church,” he prayed.

From the beginning of his presentation, he spoke rapturously of nature. The first few minutes were about big old trees and haunting romantic landscapes and the loss, long ago, of virgin forests. He spoke achingly of earlier folks like Allen who got to walk in woods we can only imagine or see in mournful photographs.

It’s in this context that the discovery of the bird became the birth of another cute-animal mascot. Koala bears, baby-faced marsupials, charming fuzzy critters? This is how Fitz presented the ivory-bill, as the new animal that would launch a decade of fund-raisers. The larger mission was, in fact, so huge—reviving entire deltas and massive swaths
of land, the Big Woods—that it made accepting the rediscovery of the bird seem minor. Fitz was in Hawking mode, sure, but it was not history he was reaching for really. It was a new partnership.

By the time he got to the evidence, he cheerfully encouraged the audience not to be troubled by the flicker of a speck of an image. In the video, the bird is no bigger than the brother-in-law’s thumb, and as it flies off it only gets smaller. Fitz says it’s crucial to get “the whole gestalt” of the bird coming off the tree. Yet it’s not as if the nuanced differences between ivory-bill and pileated perch-departing gestalts were then common knowledge. If anything, that very odd word permitted the audience to fill in the gaps of what was not seen. If you’re looking for a gestalt—instead of clear identifiable proof—then you’ll see the gestalt and be convinced. Fitz’s audience in Santa Barbara that day saw it and cooed.

The various complaints from Prum and the others who had questioned his evidence—what did he make of those? They were useful, he said, because the brief controversy lent an air of scientific struggle and, by extension, legitimacy. Barely an air, though. At the end, he posted a slide in his PowerPoint presentation that read “Scientific Spice” and then listed Prum, Robbins, and three other minor skeptics. His body language and vocal tone formed its own communication, suggesting that while he should obviously feel nothing less than contempt for these pathetic apostates, he had conquered the world and so it was easier to be generous in a chuckling, belittling sort of way.

“I particularly want to especially thank these guys for adding scientific spice to the discussion all summer long,” said a bemused Fitz.

Science was less than an appetizer. It was a pinch of herb sprinkled over the main dish. Even the bird was not the entree. Throughout the talk, Fitz invited his peers to journey with him past the shaky evidence to the larger marketing campaign for big-scale land conservation. In his very last line, before he accepted the grateful applause of a thousand ornithologists, he intoned: “We can save these forests, and we can do it with a great badge of a bird at the top of the treetops if things work out right.”

Words betray us. To Fitz, the ivory-bill was not a bird. It was a logo.