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March-April 2007
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A True Believer |
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Photograph by Jason Koski / Cornell University Photography |
John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory Of Ornithology,
alert to the possibilities at the Bayou DeView in Arkansas |
Back in 1985, Fitzpatrick received the highest research honor of the American Ornithologists’ Union for his work on the ecology, social behavior, and conservation of the Florida scrub jay, and he has stuck with the bird faithfully. Then he was curator of birds at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where he went after earning his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1978. He left Chicago in 1988 and got closer to his admired jay as executive director of Archbold Biological Station, a private ecological research foundation in Lake Placid, Florida. All this time he also led expeditions to remote precincts of South America and described seven previously unidentified species of bird. In 1995 he became professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell and the Louis Agassiz Fuertes director of the CLO. (Fuertes was a superb painter of birds, and his father, who taught at Cornell, was an admirer of Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The inventor of the air conditioner was Willis Haviland Carrier, a Cornell alumnus.)
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Photograph by Tim Gallagher |
The charismatic Florida scrub jay |
Each year Fitzpatrick leaves ice-bound Ithaca to spend 15 field days in the so-called “hills” of the Lake Wales Ridge area of central Florida, mapping the 60 or so territories in the main demographic area of banded jays that he and colleagues are studying. “The Florida scrub jay is my tonic,” says Fitzpatrick, who has reason to need one from time to time. “It is charismatic and an absurdly tameable bird. When you walk into its territory, it sits on your head.”
The ivory-billed woodpecker does not. This awesome figure of the forests of the southeastern United States—the Lord God Bird, as it was called—is now elusive in the extreme, if not a goner entirely. At CLO, Fitzpatrick is at ground zero in the ivorybill wars, which concern what, exactly, cautious scientists and careful field observers have been seeing lately in the woods.
On the day before April 28, 2005, most ornithologists and bird-watchers believed the ivorybill was probably extinct, as the last confirmed sighting in the United States was in 1944. The bird was killed wholesale for a century or more by native Americans and others who wanted the male’s decorative red head, and then loggers decimated its living rooms. On April 28, in Washington, D.C., in the company of the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments and two senators, Fitzpatrick announced that a Cornell-led team had confirmed the existence in 2004 and early 2005 of a single male ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, along a stream called Bayou DeView in the White River National Wildlife Refuge. The journal Science published these findings; after all, they issued from perhaps the most prestigious bird-study center on earth. The world rejoiced, at least that considerable part of it that sees a wonderfulness in birds.
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