Customer Reviews

The Grail Bird: The Rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

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This is a well-written insider's tale of the confirmed sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004, which amazed all of us who are even remotely interested in birds and wildlife. The last previous confirmed sighting was in 1944, in the NE corner of Louisiana, an area that was logged and destroyed later that year. Interesting, then, that the rare bird, long thought extinct, shows up just upriver in Arkansas.

One of the things that makes Gallagher's book so good is his tracking down various unconfirmed sightings over the years. In light of what we now know, that the ivory-bill lives!, these sightings become much more plausible in retrospect. And there is a pattern that emerges -- sightings across southern Louisiana from west (Sabine River) to central (Atchafalaya Basin) to east (Pearl River). A long-lost tape has been unearthed confirming a 1966 "sighting" (hearing) in the Sabine River area of east Texas. The 850,000 acre Atchafalaya Basin was the location of several sightings in the 1970s and 1980s. A highly credible 1999 sighting in the Pearl River area led to an intensive search that found nothing. It is quite possible therefore, based on the evidence presented in this book, that the ivory-bill survives not only in the Cache and White River area of east-central Arkansas, but in the swamps of southern Lousiana as well!

What's the moral of the story? Habitat preservation! The area in Arkansas is protected land, which was expanded by Nature Conservancy purchases between the February 2004 sightings and the recent public announcement, and protecting critical habitat in the three river basins mentioned above might well secure more elusive ivory-bill populations. Designation and protection of critical habitat is in fact mandated by the Endangered Species Act.

The two top websites for more on the amazing ivory-bill story are The Nature Conservancy (http://www.tnc.org) and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (http://www.birds.cornell.edu).

Tim Gallagher's newest book, The Grail Bird, is indeed the truth behind the rediscovery. I've been a follower of Ivory-billed Woodpecker history and sightings for several years. I've tried to read any book that has any noteworthy mention of the species within. This is the best book I have ever come across. It contains a great wealth of information on the history of the species right up to Tim's own personal sighting a little more than a year ago.

Do you know who took the mystery photos of the 1971 Ivory-billed Woodpecker? Tim does. And, thanks to his sleuthing, now I do too. It's all in his book.

Tim is a great writer and a great detective. He tracked down every possible lead he could find and interviewed anyone he thought may have seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker or who knew of someone who had. His interviews and stories are very interesting with great personal lines from Tim that will make you laugh and maybe even cry. After reading his book you will come away feeling as if you were there, right alongside Tim and his friend, Bobby, on their journeys for the truth.

I know you will thoroughly enjoy this.

Good reading!

I assumed we would have to wait a few months, or even a year, for the inside story of the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait at all, as Tim Gallagher was simultaneously searching for the bird and working on this most excellent book. Another reviewer used the word "perfect" to describe The Grail Bird, and I think that's about right, as Gallagher has somehow arrived at the perfect mix of natural history, detective story, and memoir. It's a delicate balance, and he found it. This book won't be a best-seller, but deserves to be.

It's really nice to know that somewhere in our rush, rush life that there is still room for a person "who gets caught up in obsessive quests" (the authors words, not mine) to go forth and find a living example of an animal thought extinct. That he can make a living doing what he loves, and that a major publishing company will publish a book like this on a fairly obscure subject is icing on the cake. Thank you Tim Gallagher. Thank you Houghton Mifflin Company.

The book is well named. The second definition of grail is "the object of a prolonged endeavor." And the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker certainly fits that description. The book was started as a way of permanently recording the reports of various sightings made in the 1930's and 40's. These sightings were treated with scorn and derision. Then in 2004 the author and another expert actually saw the bird. Since then, a massive search effort has resulted in some seven sightings being made. The bird lives.

Birding has become a major hobby in the United States. If you're a birder, or if you know one, you couldn't do better than this book for Christmas, birthday or whatever.

THE GRAIL BIRD is the story behind the headlines of the ivory-bill's rediscovery. Gallagher succeeds in conveying all of the emotion behind the pursuit of the ivory-billed woodpecker, so that even a nonbirder will weep when he first encounters this "extinct" creature. I read the book twice - and sobbed both times.

He brings history to life through interviews with those who have seen (or claimed to see) the bird in years past, and through discussions with family members of those had seen the bird but who are now gone. This is a perfect book - part birding adventure, part buddy tale, part sad truth about what we have done to our land, and part fairy tale. It is even part choose-your-own-adventure, in that we all need to take responsiblity for what the ending will be like for this remarkable bird.

This book is an amazing tale of the expeditions to rediscover the elusive (and formerly thought-to-be-extinct) Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Finding this bird (for non-birders reading this review) is the equivalent of finding Elvis Presley alive and well for music fans! And really, Tim Gallagher is the best person to have written it, having been a part of the process from day one. The storyline is good, and the humor that Tim interjects into it really made this book an easy and interesting read. I purchased this book and read it cover to cover all in the same day.

I should also note that before this book was released, I had read "The Race To Save The Lord God Bird" by Phil Hoose, and it was also a good read, but this book pretty much picks up where the Hoose book left off in terms of current efforts and info about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

This book is a MUST HAVE for those interested in the species, or in conservation issues in general, because the message within the story of the amazing rediscovery of this magnificent bird is that perhaps we should ALL be more mindful of conservation issues in general. On that note -- I highly recommend that you buy/read the book!!

Like most birdlovers around the world, I was very pleased to hear that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been "rediscovered". The fact that the famous Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology was involved and had published their findings in the journal Science left me with no reasonable doubt that the persistence of this species was now confirmed, and I had little incentive to read Tim Gallagher's book, though I have enjoyed another book by Tim and have even met him in the distant past at a raptor conference and found him to be a very nice fellow.

However, while visiting a friend who is a hard-core birder recently, I found out about a growing skepticism movement involving heretofore silent expert ornithologists who doubt the quality of evidence used to justify the conclusion that the species persists. I learned that some experts have reviewed the Luneau tape frame by frame and have reached completely opposite conclusions that those reached by Cornell. And recently Jerome Jackson, author of the scientific species accounts for both pileated and ivory-billed woodpeckers has published his own account in the journal "The Auk" in which he questions the "faith-based ornithology" of the Cornell crew and states his own opinion that the bird seen in the Luneau video is a normal pileated woodpecker. I find all this controversy within the realm of scientists and birders to be delicious! And so I read the Gallagher book after all.

This is definitely an enjoyable story, with appropriate color, tensions, historic aspects, and interesting people discussed. My impression is that Tim Gallagher is a very nice person, hard-working and well-informed on the history and published encounters of various humans over time with the ivory-billed woodpecker. He is by no means gullible when discussing sightings with a variety of people, but at the same time seems to be incredibly trusting. I can't recall a single sighting that he discounted of a number of claimed sightings in this book! It is as if Mr. Gallagher wants so much for the bird to be confirmed alive and well that he overcompensates for normal skepticism. One famous scientist once said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but no such extraordinary proof has been forthcoming, despite massive levels of effort by incredibly skilled and talented searchers.

This book seems to give an interesting perspective in human nature, including groupthink and the tendency of people to transfer intellectual knowledge into the illusion of personal experience. It seems as if many birders who never saw an ivory-billed woodpecker have so closely studied the bird on paper and on tape that they have no doubts (or few doubts) when they (believe they) see a bird in the field that has long been presumed to be extinct. It seems like a sort of mantra was embedded on the psyches of searchers that allowed them to visualize in birds in flight the characteristics they were looking for. At least until the persistence of the species is documented irrefutably, that is the position I am left with after reading this book.

As an example, most of the alleged recent viewers of the ivory-bill emphasize the significant difference in size between the pileated and ivory-billed woodpeckers. Yet, species expert Jerome Jackson has correctly noted that the difference in length between a pileated and an ivory-billed woodpecker is about the same as the difference in length between a yardstick and a one-meter measuring stick. All reported recent views of ivory-bills have been relatively fleeting glimpses, often at distances of many yards, and it seems that the difference in size between pileated (common) woodpeckers and ivory-bills must not be nearly as significant as the viewers wanted to believe. Were they operating on faith? The same could be said about manner of flight between the two species, with it being possible to locate testimony from the late James Tanner that the two species could fly in a very similar manner to one another, and that one was not restricted to direct flight or to undulating flight.

All of this discussion in the book and the ready acceptance of it by the author leads me to have increased skepticism over the validity of the conclusions reached by the author and the Cornell team and all the associates and collaborators. This skepticism means that additional proof is desperately needed.

Of course, Tim Gallagher knows and had long known about the degree of skepticism that has haunted previous claimants of viewing ivory-billed woodpeckers and is no doubt fully aware of the consequences of the problematic substantiation of his own claims and those of his colleagues and collaborators. An interesting, recent dynamic of ivory-bill sightings is that appropriate skepticism seems to now be politically incorrect and "sightings" of ivory-bills are much more likely to be accepted now than ever before. And this is not necessarily due to dishonesty of the claimants, but could be an artifact of human nature amongst knowledgable birders who know exactly what to look for and may subconsciously transfer that knowledge into the perception of what they actually see in the field. It is as if the whole dynamic of appropriate scientific skepticism of seeing an extinct species is backwards and upside down! This further adds to the deliciousness of this controversy.

Most of the skeptics, myself included, hope with quiet desperation that the needed proof is obtained and is irrefutable. We want that species to live and we want to do everything in our power to enhance its ability to survive and to thrive, along with other species in that special habitat that has been so abused by human intrusion.

This is a very good book, with all the right components to make it easy to read and hard to put down.

Stan Moore San Geronimo, CA

I was too excited the day I was at work and a co-worker said "They found a bird they thought was extinct". I knew immediately it was the Ivory-bill woodpecker--I even told him the bird before he could tell me from the article. I couldn't wait to find out more. I immediately got on the internet and searched out anything I could find, from Cornell's site to ivorybill.org to NPR.

When I saw Mr. Gallagher had put a first-hand account of the search, I had to have it. I started researching the Ivory-bill a few years back when one was reported seen in the Singer Tract, but nothing compared to the education I received by reading this book. Not only was it educational but entertaining as well. The story is written just as if Mr. Gallagher were telling the story in person. The detail was such that I could close my eyes for a few seconds and picture myself there with Tim, Bobby, Gene and the rest of the investigating crew.

If you're the slightest interested in the ivory-billed woodpecker or birds in general, you will enjoy this book.

Kudos and many, many thanks to the teams spending their time in the bayous and swamps searching for this magnificant bird. I'm hoping one day to see one myself, and if not,I hope my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy them!

I suppose the early readers of this work are birders or lean toward that obsession, so it stands to reason we'd like it enough to give unanimous high praise.

But don't let it throw you, if you're just not into birding. This is an excellent and gripping STORY, not only a bird chase.

The people you'll meet are human and likeable (Bobby is my new hero), and you'll find that parting company is hard when you come to the end of this brief, intense work. I checked this out from my library, and, after reading it, immediately got online and told Amazon to send me a copy. I want friends to read it, I want my wife to read it -- it is that good. There'll be a number of people getting this for Christmas and Birthdays.

Thanks, Tim Gallagher, for sharing this adventure tale and your wonderful friends with us. It was even appreciated by us Southerners, who you seem to think are all would-be slave-owners and lynchers of minorities. If you do some checking you'll find that was done up North as much if not more, by the way. The South will Rise again! and we'll have Ivory Bills!!!

"The Grail Bird" is the story of author Tim Gallagher's quest for the ivory-billed woodpecker, which inhabited the primeval swamp forests of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi until the species was declared extinct in the 1940s after the last large tract of its habitat was logged out. But occasional sightings of the bird by hunters, sportsman, and ornithologists persisted. These reports were met with skepticism and even disdain by the ornithological community until a sighting in 1999 by David Kulivan in the Pearl River area of Louisiana renewed interest in finding the bird. Tim Gallagher, editor-in-chief of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's "Living Bird" magazine, was among those birding enthusiasts captivated by the possibility that the ivory-bill, once America's largest woodpecker, had survived. "The Grail Bird" is a chronicle of his quest to learn as much as he could about the ivory-bill and then to find the bird itself.

"The Grail Bird" is as much about the people who have searched for the ivory-billed woodpecker as it is about the bird. From famed conservationists to obsessive hobbyists, Gallagher traces the history of ivory-bill sightings and study, spanning a couple of centuries and many interesting personalities. He gives particular attention to the sightings in the 1950s through 1980s, interviewing everyone he could find who might have seen an ivory-bill. Most of the ornithological community steadfastly refused to acknowledge the ivory-bill's existence in the face of a good sound recording in the 1960s and photographs in 1971, ridiculing and ostracizing scientists who disagreed. Now, with muddier evidence than they had then, it has ironically become acceptable to believe the ivory-bill is extant. "The Grail Bird" wraps up with the massive effort to document the bird's existence in 2004 following a sighting by Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison in Bayou de View, Arkansas. In April 2005, the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker was announced to the world as "The Grail Bird" was being published. Tim Gallagher has written a real page-turner that takes the reader on his journey into the history, habitat, and passion for the ivory-billed woodpecker.