At some point during my youth in western Pennsylvania, I read about a magnificent bird – the ivory bill woodpecker, the Lord God Bird. I wanted badly to see one and I knew that my dad – a naturalist – would know where to look. “They’re gone,” he said. I looked at him quizzically. “They’re extinct. They need big, old forests, and the big, old forests have all been cut down.” My dad was right. You should know that going into this film – a feature-length documentary that is powerful and sad and very much worth seeing.
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Ghosts of Trees, Ghosts of Birds
People imagine they see them still,
ivory bills,
in remnant stands of virgin forests
too small to sustain these great birds.
In that way God Lord Birds are everywhere –
an image in burnt toast, a shadow pulling itself
into a triangular head,
a flash of red
as the late sun slants through the canopy,
or a fractured rock on a hillside gathering the feathered light
and darkness like a black and white diamond on a water oak trunk.
Ghosts of trees, ghosts of birds
Their nesting holes,
five inches across, 50 feet up –
hewn into hardwood with bone-chisel bill –
gone, too,
vanished with the ancient forests
into the humid air
above the endless spread of soy bean fields
Ghosts of trees, ghosts of birds
And so we pause
in the late morning
and set our paddles across the canoe’s gunwales
amidst the cypress knees, black gum and snags
as the mist lifts from this swamp
far enough away from all that
that it could be
the last place on earth
these birds exist
and strain our ears
and listen for double knocks
that rose and died 60 years ago.
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