My visits to Cornell’s Kroch Library, where the Rare and Manuscript Collections are housed, have been very productive. In addition to the last letter to Tanner pertaining to the Singer Tract ivorybills quoted at length here, I’ve come across several little known ivorybill images, some better quality reproductions of the plates in Tanner, and some additional hints about ivorybill foraging excavations that I’ll discuss in a future post. I suspect that all of the images below are actually stills from the 1935 film footage that has been lost save for a few minutes. To see it, go here and start at 14:00. To the best of my knowledge, these images have not previously been published as stills, and a couple of the frames may never have been publicly available.

The first image is similar to the one that appears on Page 82 0f  The Race to Save the Lord God Bird.  This is a sequence (that apparently has been lost) in which the birds are changing places on the nest. A third image that follows the first two appears on p. 120 of The Race . . . A colorized version, at once gorgeous and crude and sadly somewhat damaged, is also included here; it’s reproduced in black and white in Jackson (p. 27).

I think the bird in the remaining frames is the male. In the second frame, he may be engaging in the motion described by Tanner, “. . . jerking as though working food from the back of its mouth.” the next frame shows the him peering into the cavity. These two images are clips from the surviving footage. The final shot may have come from a lost piece of film, since a remaining clip, filmed from a similar angle doesn’t include it.

In addition to the images posted below, two figures in Tanner’s dissertation include unpublished photos from 1938 – one of a male at the nest cavity and the other of a juvenile peering out of it. Those images may also be included in a future post. All four pictures below were taken with my iPhone. I have a high resolution scan of the fourth on order, since it is one of the best representations of presumed ivorybill excavation available. Images are Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.