Indelible Images - The Rarest Bird - Sept10

The ivory-billed woodpecker is one of the most extraordinary birds ever to live in America’s forests: the biggest woodpecker in the United States, it seems to keep coming back from the dead. Once resident in swampy bottomlands from North Carolina to East Texas, it was believed to have gone extinct as early as the 1920s, but sightings, confirmed and otherwise, have been reported as recently as this year.

The young ornithologist James T. Tanner’s sightings in the late 1930s came with substantial documentation: not only field notes, from which he literally wrote the book on the species, but also photographs. In fact, Tanner’s photographs remain the most recent uncontested pictures of the American ivory-bill. Now his widow, Nancy Tanner, has discovered more photographs that he took on a fateful day in 1938.

Tanner was a doctoral candidate at Cornell University when, in 1937, he was sent to look for ivory-bills in Southern swamplands, including a vast virgin forest in northeast Louisiana called the Singer Tract. Two years earlier, his mentor, Arthur Allen, founder of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, had proved that the “Lord God” bird—so named for what people supposedly exclaimed after getting a look at its 20-inch body and 30-inch wingspan—was still extant, with observations of several adult ivory-bills in the same forest.

“There are relatively few references to young Ivorybills,” Allen wrote in 1937, “and there is no complete description of an immature bird.” But that would soon change.

On his initial solo trip to the Singer Tract, Tanner became the first person to provide such a description, after watching two adults feed a nestling in a hole they’d carved high in a sweet gum tree. “It took me some time to realize that the bird in the hole was a young one; it seemed impossible,” he scribbled in his field notes. When he returned to those woods in early 1938, he discovered another nest hole, 55 feet off the ground in the trunk of a red maple. And in it he discovered another young ivory-bill.

Watching the nest for 16 days, Tanner noted that the bird’s parents usually foraged for about 20 minutes at midday. No ivory-bill had ever been fitted with an identifying band, so Tanner resolved to affix one to the nestling’s leg while its parents were away.

On his 24th birthday, March 6, 1938, Tanner decided to act. Up he went, on went the band—and out came the ivory-bill, bolting from the nest in a panic after Tanner trimmed a branch impeding his view of the nest hole. Too young to fly, the bird fluttered to a crash landing “in a tangle of vines,” Tanner wrote in his field notes, “where he clung, calling and squalling.” The ornithologist scrambled down the tree, retrieved the bird and handed it to his guide, J. J. Kuhn. “I surely thought that I had messed things up,” Tanner wrote. But as the minutes ticked away, he “unlimbered” his camera and began shooting, “jittery and nervous as all get-out,” unsure of whether he was getting any useful pictures. After exhausting his film, he returned the bird to its nest, “probably as glad as he that he was back there.”

When Tanner’s Cornell dissertation was published as The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in 1942, the book included two pictures of the juvenile bird perched on Kuhn’s arm and head. Those frames, along with four others less widely printed—the only known photographs of a living nestling ivory-bill—have provided generations of birders with an image laden with fragile, possibly doomed, hope.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is one of the most extraordinary birds ever to live in America’s forests: the biggest woodpecker in the United States, it seems to keep coming back from the dead. Once resident in swampy bottomlands from North Carolina to East Texas, it was believed to have gone extinct as early as the 1920s, but sightings, confirmed and otherwise, have been reported as recently as this year.

The young ornithologist James T. Tanner’s sightings in the late 1930s came with substantial documentation: not only field notes, from which he literally wrote the book on the species, but also photographs. In fact, Tanner’s photographs remain the most recent uncontested pictures of the American ivory-bill. Now his widow, Nancy Tanner, has discovered more photographs that he took on a fateful day in 1938.

Tanner was a doctoral candidate at Cornell University when, in 1937, he was sent to look for ivory-bills in Southern swamplands, including a vast virgin forest in northeast Louisiana called the Singer Tract. Two years earlier, his mentor, Arthur Allen, founder of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, had proved that the “Lord God” bird—so named for what people supposedly exclaimed after getting a look at its 20-inch body and 30-inch wingspan—was still extant, with observations of several adult ivory-bills in the same forest.

“There are relatively few references to young Ivorybills,” Allen wrote in 1937, “and there is no complete description of an immature bird.” But that would soon change.

On his initial solo trip to the Singer Tract, Tanner became the first person to provide such a description, after watching two adults feed a nestling in a hole they’d carved high in a sweet gum tree. “It took me some time to realize that the bird in the hole was a young one; it seemed impossible,” he scribbled in his field notes. When he returned to those woods in early 1938, he discovered another nest hole, 55 feet off the ground in the trunk of a red maple. And in it he discovered another young ivory-bill.

Watching the nest for 16 days, Tanner noted that the bird’s parents usually foraged for about 20 minutes at midday. No ivory-bill had ever been fitted with an identifying band, so Tanner resolved to affix one to the nestling’s leg while its parents were away.

On his 24th birthday, March 6, 1938, Tanner decided to act. Up he went, on went the band—and out came the ivory-bill, bolting from the nest in a panic after Tanner trimmed a branch impeding his view of the nest hole. Too young to fly, the bird fluttered to a crash landing “in a tangle of vines,” Tanner wrote in his field notes, “where he clung, calling and squalling.” The ornithologist scrambled down the tree, retrieved the bird and handed it to his guide, J. J. Kuhn. “I surely thought that I had messed things up,” Tanner wrote. But as the minutes ticked away, he “unlimbered” his camera and began shooting, “jittery and nervous as all get-out,” unsure of whether he was getting any useful pictures. After exhausting his film, he returned the bird to its nest, “probably as glad as he that he was back there.”

When Tanner’s Cornell dissertation was published as The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in 1942, the book included two pictures of the juvenile bird perched on Kuhn’s arm and head. Those frames, along with four others less widely printed—the only known photographs of a living nestling ivory-bill—have provided generations of birders with an image laden with fragile, possibly doomed, hope.

In a 1942 article for the ornithological journal The Wilson Bulletin, Tanner wrote “there is little doubt but that complete logging of the [Singer] tract will cause the end of the Ivorybills there.” The tract was indeed completely logged, and an ivory-bill sighting there in 1944 remains the last uncontested observation anywhere in the United States. Before he died at age 76 in 1991, Tanner, who taught for 32 years at the University of Tennessee, had sadly concluded that the species was extinct.

Three years ago, I began working with Nancy Tanner on a book about her husband’s fieldwork. In June 2009, she discovered a faded manila envelope in the back of a drawer at her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. In it were some ivory-bill images. At her invitation, I started going through them.

One of the first things I found was a glassine envelope containing a 2 1/4- by 3 1/4-inch negative. Holding it up to the light, I realized it was of the nestling ivory-bill from the Singer Tract—an image I had never seen. I quickly found another negative, then another and another. My hands began to shake. It turned out that Tanner had taken not 6 pictures on that long-ago March 6, but 14. As a group, they show the young bird not frozen in time, but rather clambering over Kuhn like a cat on a scratching post, frightened but vital.

Like almost any ornithologist, Jim Tanner would have liked to have been proved wrong about the ivory-bill’s fate. In 2005, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology announced that searchers had seen an ivory-bill multiple times in ten months in the Big Woods in Arkansas. Other researchers, connected to Auburn University, reported 13 sightings in 2005 and 2006 along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida’s panhandle. In both cases, the sightings were made by experienced observers, including trained ornithologists. Yet neither group’s documentation—including a 4.5-second video of a bird in Arkansas—has been universally accepted. So the wait for incontrovertible evidence continues. Photographs like the ones Jim Tanner took in 1938 would do nicely.

Stephen Lyn Bales is a naturalist in Knoxville. His book about James Tanner, Ghost Birds, is due out this month.

Indelible Images - Unmasked - Aug10

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a mood of boisterous celebration filled the particulate-dense air of New York City. Mayor John V. Lindsay traveled around by electric bus. In a speech at Union Square he asked, “Do we want to live or die?”A crowd of 20,000 packed the square to catch a glimpse of Paul Newman standing on a raised platform. Stretches of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, closed to automobile traffic, were transformed into pedestrian seas, amid which office workers set down picnic blankets and girls handed out fresh daisies. Activists hauled nets of dead fish through Midtown streets. “You’re next, people!” they cried. “You’re next!”

Out of all the hubbub that beset the nation that day 40 years ago—a day when students buried trash-filled caskets and put a Chevy on trial for polluting the air—one image would capture the spirit with particular efficiency and wit. It’s a black-and-white photograph of a young man wearing a vintage gas mask as he stretched to smell the magnolias. Reproduced instantly and ever since, it came to symbolize the occasion. (This magazine, which made its debut in April 1970, published the picture in its 20th-anniversary issue.)

But the photograph presents a few substantial mysteries. For one, there’s no record of who took it. The credit line reads simply “Associated Press,” and the AP’s files identify the photographer only as a “stringer,” or freelancer. For another, though a few newspapers printed the young man’s name with the picture at the time, he too was soon rendered anonymous.

Now it can be told, or retold: his name, resurrected from a Pace College publication dated 1970, is Peter Hallerman. He was then a sophomore at Pace, commuting to its Lower Manhattan campus from Queens. In all these years, he says, he has never been interviewed about the event in question.

As he recalls, he was one of about 30 Pace students who held what was surely one of the day’s puniest demonstrations. They crossed the street from their campus to a park near City Hall and chanted slogans and waved brooms, some of them daring to make a sweep or two. (Their permit forbade them to actually clean the park.)

At least the collegians had planned for maximum impact: they demonstrated at lunch hour, hoping the City Hall press corps would straggle out to gather a bit of Earth Day color. “We figured we’d at least get noticed,” Hallerman says. “Whether it would be reported on was something else.”

Sure enough, a handful of journalists appeared. In a dramatic flourish, Hallerman strapped on a gas mask that he believes his mother, Edith, had saved from her service with the Red Cross during World War II. (Though gas masks were a common Earth Day accessory, this long-snouted beast looked particularly awful.) The AP photographer posed Hallerman in front of a blossoming magnolia tree, then changed his mind. “Try leaning over and smelling those flowers,” Hallerman recalls the photographer saying. Hallerman bent his six-foot frame over a short fence surrounding the tree so that the mask’s proboscis touched the pink-white blossoms. The photographer snapped his shot, and Hallerman thought nothing more of it.

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a mood of boisterous celebration filled the particulate-dense air of New York City. Mayor John V. Lindsay traveled around by electric bus. In a speech at Union Square he asked, “Do we want to live or die?”A crowd of 20,000 packed the square to catch a glimpse of Paul Newman standing on a raised platform. Stretches of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, closed to automobile traffic, were transformed into pedestrian seas, amid which office workers set down picnic blankets and girls handed out fresh daisies. Activists hauled nets of dead fish through Midtown streets. “You’re next, people!” they cried. “You’re next!”

Out of all the hubbub that beset the nation that day 40 years ago—a day when students buried trash-filled caskets and put a Chevy on trial for polluting the air—one image would capture the spirit with particular efficiency and wit. It’s a black-and-white photograph of a young man wearing a vintage gas mask as he stretched to smell the magnolias. Reproduced instantly and ever since, it came to symbolize the occasion. (This magazine, which made its debut in April 1970, published the picture in its 20th-anniversary issue.)

But the photograph presents a few substantial mysteries. For one, there’s no record of who took it. The credit line reads simply “Associated Press,” and the AP’s files identify the photographer only as a “stringer,” or freelancer. For another, though a few newspapers printed the young man’s name with the picture at the time, he too was soon rendered anonymous.

So who was that masked man?

Now it can be told, or retold: his name, resurrected from a Pace College publication dated 1970, is Peter Hallerman. He was then a sophomore at Pace, commuting to its Lower Manhattan campus from Queens. In all these years, he says, he has never been interviewed about the event in question.

As he recalls, he was one of about 30 Pace students who held what was surely one of the day’s puniest demonstrations. They crossed the street from their campus to a park near City Hall and chanted slogans and waved brooms, some of them daring to make a sweep or two. (Their permit forbade them to actually clean the park.)

At least the collegians had planned for maximum impact: they demonstrated at lunch hour, hoping the City Hall press corps would straggle out to gather a bit of Earth Day color. “We figured we’d at least get noticed,” Hallerman says. “Whether it would be reported on was something else.”

Sure enough, a handful of journalists appeared. In a dramatic flourish, Hallerman strapped on a gas mask that he believes his mother, Edith, had saved from her service with the Red Cross during World War II. (Though gas masks were a common Earth Day accessory, this long-snouted beast looked particularly awful.) The AP photographer posed Hallerman in front of a blossoming magnolia tree, then changed his mind. “Try leaning over and smelling those flowers,” Hallerman recalls the photographer saying. Hallerman bent his six-foot frame over a short fence surrounding the tree so that the mask’s proboscis touched the pink-white blossoms. The photographer snapped his shot, and Hallerman thought nothing more of it.

The following week, a Pace administrator presented him with an inch-thick stack of newspaper clippings that included the picture: clearly, it had struck a nerve around the country.

Peter Hallerman wasn’t your standard hippie activist. In 1967 he paraded down Fifth Avenue in support of the Vietnam War. In 1969 he followed the music to Woodstock but remained ignorant of the intricacies of igniting hashish. His status as Earth Day poster boy, however, seems just: “The desire to get out, to camp, to have contact with my environment beyond the city streets, was always very strong for me,” says Hallerman, a former Boy Scout and still an intrepid camper.

Hallerman’s 19th birthday was on May 4, less than two weeks after that inaugural Earth Day. That was the day Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. Four days later, Hallerman attended his first antiwar demonstration, in New York’s financial district; he remembers standing on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial when hundreds of construction workers from the World Trade Center building site poured onto the scene, attacking the youthful protesters before storming City Hall in what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot.

And then his witness-to-history days were over. “My wife, Ellen, jokes that I went through a mini-Forrest Gump phase,” he says.

Rather than return to Pace in the fall of 1970, Hallerman drifted out West, working in coal mines and on railroad crews—fulfilling a high-school guidance counselor’s judgment that he was “uniquely qualified for manual labor.” After six grueling years, he headed back East and into the white-collar world. Now he’s an account executive for Trans World Marketing Corporation of East Rutherford, New Jersey, which designs and makes retail displays, and he lives with his wife on a quiet, leafy lane in South Salem, New York, 50 miles north of the city.

A few years ago, Ellen and their two sons, Ethan and Matthew, now 24 and 21, gave him a mounted blowup of the famous picture for his birthday. But he hasn’t hung it. Even now, he says he’s surprised that it became a cultural touchstone. “I’m flattered to have been involved in something of such historic significance,” he says. “But if that was my 15 minutes of fame, it’s a little frustrating that I was wearing a gas mask and looked like an anteater.”

Timothy Dumas wrote the August 2009 Indelible Images, about a photograph taken at the Woodstock music festival in 1969.