The Hero Who Convinced His Fellow Ornithologists of the Obvious: Stop Shooting Rare Birds and Watch Them Instead

Arthur Allen carefully packed his camera and luggage at his home in Ithaca, New York. He would soon head south to the backwood swamps of Osceola County, Florida, to search for a ghost bird: the ivory-billed woodpecker. Most scientists considered it extinct; Allen was desperate to prove them wrong.

The year was 1924, and Allen was an energetic ornithology professor at Cornell University, about to take a sabbatical. A stocky, outgoing man with a bushy mustache, he’d always been popular with his students, who called him Doc Allen and liked how he never talked down to them. He’d been born and raised in working-class Buffalo, New York, moving to Ithaca in 1904 to study at Cornell and never left.

Allen was not the first to be enthralled by this charismatic bird, the largest woodpecker in the U.S., with stunning black-and-white plumage, gleaming white bill and yellow eyes. In the 18th century, the English artist and naturalist Mark Catesby described the bird and painted it for the first volume of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, published in 1731. The bird later caught the attention of several early 19th-century naturalists, including artists Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, who included paintings of the species in their books. For artistic accuracy, they collected a few specimens—which was not a problem at that point. But that soon changed, as people cut down vast tracts of forest to make way for farmland, destroying vital habitats. They also killed many birds for commercial gain, driving some species to extinction—most notably the passenger pigeon, which was shot by the millions as food for people and livestock.

Allen was obsessive about studying birds—especially species that were vanishing. At this point, the great auk, passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet were already extinct, and most thought the ivory-billed woodpecker was also gone. Allen was determined to spend months if necessary scouring Florida in search of this bird, to study the species in depth and take photographs. The trip would herald a new era in ornithology—one where scientists stopped killing rare birds and started trying to keep them alive.

Before 1796, when French scientist Georges Cuvier first proposed the concept of extinction, people didn’t know a species could be lost forever. The idea that any of God’s creatures could just vanish from the earth was simply unthinkable. In the previous decade, Thomas Jefferson had written: “Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct.” And yet in the Victorian era, when people did become aware that species could be lost, it only heightened their interest in shooting them to add to collections. The Victorian age was the heyday of specimen collecting—especially birds and their eggs—and the species closest to extinction were the ones most prized. “Now is the time to collect,” wrote W.T. Hornaday, then the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist, in an 1891 book. “The time will come when the majority of the vertebrate species now inhabiting the earth … will be either totally exterminated or exist only under protection.”

Prominent figures in ornithology were involved in the slaughter. William Brewster—co-founder and an early president of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), now the American Ornithological Society—owned more than 40,000 specimens and later became curator of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He shot many birds himself and bought rare bird carcasses from other enthusiasts, including his friend Arthur T. Wayne. After one trip in 1892, Wayne wrote Brewster that he had collected 43 Bachman’s warblers (a bird now extinct) and 13 “fine ivory-billed woodpeckers.” Wayne later placed an advertisement on the back cover of the AOU’s journal, The Auk, offering four pairs of ivory-bills for sale. It appeared below an ad for repeating rifles.

Scientists certainly knew what was happening with the ivory-bill. “The probabilities are that [the ivory-billed woodpecker] will soon be extinct,” wrote naturalist Charles Abbott in 1894.