![]() “Wow! Wow! Listen to that! That’s the call of the black-and-white owl. Even the most hideous squawks light his face with pleasure. “Oh.” He puts a cassette of birdcalls on the tape machine the room quivers with the sound turned up to full volume. He identifies it as being from a species of Mexican goatsucker. We look at it gravely, spinning it between thumb and forefinger, and then give up. “Now, what sort of feather is this?” he asks. ![]() He opens and burrows through the contents of his briefcase-bird books, tapes of birdcalls, checklists, feathers. ![]() He wears the binoculars around the apartment and scans the East River, which flows by our windows. Presumably, in the city, there is always a chance of a peregrine falcon dropping from a window ledge onto a pigeon. When he comes to New York for a visit, he arrives at our apartment with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck he is forever on the lookout. I was entranced not only by his patience-expert birders can be extremely aloof with amateurs-but by his enthusiasm. A poor and confused birder, I went along as a journalist. I first met Victor in 1972 when I joined his Christmas Bird Count in Freeport, Texas, which regularly either wins or comes in a close second in the nationwide contest for the record number of birds spotted over a 24-hour period. Victor told me that “it was like seeing a dinosaur.” The thought of going after the imperial woodpecker brought back that same feeling of excitement. Victor had already enjoyed the heady intoxication of observing a species thought by many to be extinct he was one of the first to identify the Eskimo curlew when that bird-to the astonishment of ornithologists whose records showed a last sighting back in 1945-turned up in a plowed field on Galveston Island, Texas, in the spring of 1959. He would check into them, and if there was the slightest chance of finding the bird, he would arrange a small expedition for us. But there had been scattered reports since. After thinking for a second or so, Victor snapped his fingers and said, “The imperial ivory-billed woodpecker!” Flinging his hands apart like an angler talking about a salmon, he went on to say that the bird was the largest of the woodpeckers, as large as a raven, and that the last verified reports of its existence had come out of the mountains of western Mexico in the early 1950s. I had an idea about doing a series of animal quests, and I had asked him what bird would be most exciting to search for-one rare, or even thought to be extinct. It was Victor Emanuel, my birdwatching friend, who first suggested looking for the imperial woodpecker. This story ran in the November-December 1977 issue of Audubon.
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