Confessions of an IBWOH: 1. Thrushes, Thrashers, and The Silent Sky

My father was from Greenville, Mississippi.  He was going to high school in Sandersville, in Jones County (famously, the "Free State of Jones") in the southern part of the state, when he met my mother.  After his service in the Marine Corps, they settled in Baytown, Texas, just to the east of Houston, where Dad found work in the oil fields.  I was born there in 1970, and was early on a child of Suburbia.

We often returned to south Mississippi to visit my mother's side of the family, and I was always impressed by the trees there.  Trees -- especially pines -- dominate the Mississippi landscape the way mountains do in Switzerland, I imagine.  Their presence is inescapable.  The horizon is seldom visible because of them.  They loom over the state and interstate highways, shrouding xenophobic towns from outsider eyes, though the brick and concrete manages to muscle its way through here and there.  Parts of Texas were (and are) much the same; but the forests near Baytown had long ago been hacked and burned and scraped away, until only a few relict stands were left lining the bayous.  Mississippi, poor in industry but rich in nature, early on made a favorable impression.  That was a good thing, as my parents moved us there in 1979.

In Mississippi, I soon learned, kids had fathers who hauled pulpwood for a living.  Shockingly, to my ten year-old, suburban mind, they also ate squirrels.  More shocking still, some folks ate robin.  People, including some dearly-loved family members, also had weird names for things.  Chimneys were "chimbleys."  Folks did not mow their yards:  they "mowered" them.  I soon decided that most Mississippians were generally confused about things, and began to think I would have to keep a mental English-Mississippian Translation Guide running at all times.  (Said Guide has served me well.)

I had early on developed a love of the natural world, and had many books on hand to inform me, so I was able to correct the adults quickly when they called a cardinal a "redbird."  I forgave them, as it is almost easier to just say "redbird"; but when I heard them refer to chimbley sweeps, I was genuinely confused as to what they were talking about.  I knew what a chimney sweep was, having watched Mary Poppins at some point:  but they were referring to birds.  I soon discovered that they meant chimney swifts.  This further solidified my position on the mental faculties of Mississippians; so, when I heard them referring to what was obviously (to me) a thrush as a "thrasher," I mentally shrugged, corrected them, and went about the business of being a smartass city kid.

Months passed, and I became further seduced by the natural world, especially birds.  Perhaps it was the Eastern bluebirds that nested in a birdhouse I built in Sunday school, or the striking red-headed woodpeckers that frequented the fenceposts and power poles along the country road where we lived.  Maybe it was one of the many birds I shot with my Red Rider BB-gun:  numerous robins (I did not eat them), the occasional bluebird, unfortunate sapsuckers.  I never was able to take a mockingbird, or a cardinal; the former are vigilant warriors, while the latter, perhaps aware of their bright beauty, are watchful to near-paranoia.  But whatever the causes, at length I felt I needed a field guide, and eventually received an Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds:  Eastern Region, which I still have to this day.

It was not long before I discovered that it was I who had been wrong.  The birds my fellow Mississippians had been calling thrashers were, in fact, thrashers, and not thrushes, as I had smugly assumed:  an early lesson in humility, among many others to come.  (The lessons have sometimes been hard, but I am thankful for them.)  The brown thrasher is every bit a fixture of the lovely Mississippi landscape as the mockingbird, though somewhat less visible.  I realized that I had never even seen a thrush of any kind; I would not see one, in fact, for many years.  The field guide continued to open my eyes, and I soon knew gems called Inca dove, black-throated green warbler, slate-colored junco, white-throated sparrow.  Shelby, my best friend in those days, also got hooked, and we joyfully pursued summer tanagers and purple finches in the intermittent forests behind his parents' property, where I also learned to hunt squirrel.  (Squirrel is pretty good, prepared the right way.  I still haven't eaten robin, though.)  In time, moreover, I became wise to what I did not know, which was pretty considerable compared to those my ten year-old brain had figured to be generally confused.  The only one slow-witted and confused, I came to realize, was me... a condition that has, admittedly, not improved much with age.

But I continued reading, and learned that there were birds that were native to Mississippi that I would not ever see.  Of these, the "Big Three" were the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  I had long been familiar with the idea of extinction, having read voraciously of dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals for years.  The Big Three, however, were something else entirely.  All three were "extreme" species:  the most numerous bird in the world, the only member of the parrot family found in the United States, and the second-largest woodpecker in the world, respectively -- all gone, due to man.  I was incredulous, and angry, that the opportunity to see these species had been taken from me by the shortsightedness of people long since dead.  I still am.  I found a copy of The Silent Sky:  The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon by Allan W. Eckert in my school library, and cried when the last wild pigeon died. I grew jealous of the peoples of Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, who could still see wild parrots in their native countries, something that I could never do.  That option had been taken from me long before I was ever born.  I began to grow frustrated by the people around me.  I could not understand why others were not as saddened as I was by our loss, not realizing that most people cannot know what it means to have lost something they never had to begin with.

But though the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet were, according to all accounts, extinct beyond doubt, the hint of possibility lingered in the literature regarding Campephilus principalis.  Like so many others before and since, I am sure, the thought of seeing an ivorybill captured my imagination, as it did that of my friend Shelby.  Every pileated we saw winging its way overhead quickened the blood in our veins, as it still does for me.  One of my earliest memories of birding involves he and I, standing in his front yard, watching a large woodpecker fly overhead; we looked and one another and yelled, "Ivorybill!" and took off after what was doubtless a pileated woodpecker.

That I can still feel that quickening of the blood at the sight of a pileated woodpecker now, over thirty years later, after my faith in so much has been shaken, and in some cases lost:  that lets me know that I am still very much alive, and am not too different from the city kid who became a bit of a country boy all those years ago.  That I felt, and still feel, sadness at losing something I never really had... well, I guess that's part of the reason I find myself in some of the most difficult habitat in the United States, chasing what many would say is a ghost.

I feel -- rightly or wrongly -- that I am owed some compensation for the silent skies.