Brinkley and the Ghost Bird

Brinkley, Arkansas, began as a railroad camp called Lick Skillet in the eighteen fifties. Lumber companies moved in and spent the next few decades harvesting the great bottomland swamp forests of eastern Arkansas with such thoroughness that by the early twentieth century the old-growth was largely gone. With the trees went the bird: the ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in North America, a crow-sized bird with a white bill and a wingspan of thirty inches that needed enormous dead trees and vast unbroken forest to survive. It was last confirmed in the United States in the nineteen forties. Scientists called it extinct.

Brinkley in two thousand four was a small Delta town of fewer than four thousand people, watching its population and its economic base both decline. Then, on February eleventh of that year, a kayaker named Gene Sparling was paddling through the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, just a few miles outside of town, when he spotted an enormous woodpecker he did not recognize. He reported the sighting. Ornithologists came. For more than a year, a team from Cornell University and the Nature Conservancy conducted a secret search through the bayous and swamps of eastern Arkansas.

On April twenty-eighth, two thousand five, they announced it to the world: at least one ivory-billed woodpecker, possibly the last of its kind, was alive in the Big Woods of Arkansas. The announcement landed in science journals and on front pages. Brinkley became a destination. Birders arrived from around the world. The town built a welcome center. Gift shops opened. For a brief moment, a dying Delta railroad town had been given a future by a bird that was supposed to be dead.

Subsequent searches have not produced a confirmed second sighting. The bird may be gone. But the Cache River bottomlands are still there, restored and expanding, some of the most significant forested wetlands in North America.