After Erskine was satisfied that the pair of Ivory bills had disappeared back into the primordial green darkness of the forest along the Congaree and were not going to bless him with a second chance to take their pictures, he tucked the video camera deeply into a dry bag and stowed it. His hands were trembling. He knew what he had in the camera but his mind turned to the improbability of it.
The odds regarding what had just happened to him were astonishingly low. He believed the several birding enthusiasts who’d claimed to have seen an Ivory bill in southern forests in recent times. But none of them had been both prepared with a video camera or quick enough to bring the lens to bear on their fleeting subject. The one video to have emerged from Big Woods of Arkansas was from a running, stationery camera on a boat, its videographer oblivious, at the time, to what the camera was capturing.
Jerry Kayro’s argument for why all the birders were seeing pileated woodpeckers and wishfully imagining otherwise, is that during the time when Ivory bills did exist, they were not particularly elusive, and so even when they’d become rare, they were not that hard to find, and kill. The rebuttal to which Erskine subscribed is that species adapt if they survive and the Ivory bill had adapted by becoming a helluva lot more discrete. You know, evolution.
Now, the proof was in the camera. Because he couldn’t help himself, he started calculating the odds against what had just happened. One in 500,000 he thought, to see the bird, one in three million to get it on video. Then he began calculating the odds against the small boat making it to the landing near the highway without sinking. Those were better odds, but he was conscious that they improved every quarter mile. And then there was the car ride, and then the probability that the camera wouldn’t cough up the images. And so on.
He was still trembling. The stories he’d read of birders and conservationists trudging through southern swamps for so many years trying to capture the proof of the Ivory bill’s improbable escape from extinction was deeply moving to him. He was beginning to get tears in his eyes as thought about it. He had to steady himself, to get a grip, and it began with the reminder, to himself, that there were roughly 1.3 billion Chinese for whom the news would mean absolutely nothing.
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