The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: "Lord God"

Lord God

For sixty-one years a spectacular species of bird has clung tenaciously and anonymously to life in an obscure wetlands area in Arkansas.

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker is the largest of its genus, with a wingspan out to four feet. It is also beautiful even by the high standards of its cousins. For these reasons it acquired the quintessential American nickname of the "Lord God" bird for the exclamation uttered by so many when they first saw it.

Partly also for these reasons the story of the bird's discovery has broken out of the ornithological community and into the mass media. These "subjective" reasons for popular attention are no less compelling or legitimate than the "objective," that a species presumed extinct is in fact extant.

We know so much about so much that the ability of this attention-grabbing but very private bird to survive undetected despite humankind's best efforts has stimulated some purely human feelings. Delight that this plucky creature foiled us for so long, wonder at the tenacity of life, delight that even the scientific method, that most relentless and result-oriented of our branches of knowledge, occasionally leaves a stone unturned. That has also made us, however briefly, more modest, which most of us agree we could be more of.

It also assuages our guilt--another uniquely human feeling--a little. The Ivory Bill has been driven to the point of extinction by us. We have done that to many other species. This gives us another chance when we know that there few second chances in life, fewer in saving life.

All of these feelings came together for the discoverers. When, paddling in their kayak the Ivory Bill flew right in front of the researchers, one of them openly wept. Lord God. And, taking advantage of our second chance we are now cutting down some trees to increase the bird's food staple, the beetle, which feeds on decomposing wood.

We, the public, would not have reacted as we have to the Ivory Bill if it had been an endangered species of cockroach that had been found. Cockroaches are not as big as Ivory Bills, except in Miami, and they are not beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder only if the beholder is human and, perhaps conceitedly, it is the spirituality, in among other things, our recognition and appreciation of beauty that marks us as distinct from all other life forms.

When we discover life elsewhere in the universe it will almost certainly not be beautiful. It will be plainly organic like bacteria or simple organisms like Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. Nor will there by any "practical" consequences of its discovery such as posing a threat of invasion, providing us with the Grand Unified Theory, or explaining the infield fly rule. The Ivory Bill and the cockroach will not notice. But it will be the most momentus event in humankind's history because it will effect us as beauty does, spiritually, ethically and philosophically, that is fundamentally as human beings.

The discovery of the Ivory Bill is a human story as much as a bird or scientific story, something that only our life form can celebrate with a species-wide, "Lord God."

-Benjamin Harris