I’m planning to do a few more posts drawing on material I’ve found in Kroch Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell. There may be an intervening post or two on  other topics.

While Tanner’s monograph is well-known, the reports he wrote for the Audubon Society at the end of each season are not publicly available, except in the archives. The contents of these reports call some conventional wisdom about the species into question.

First and perhaps least important, it seems to be commonly believed that the John’s Bayou birds were the only remaining ivorybills in the Singer Tract when Tanner visited in December 1941. They were indeed the only birds he saw, as noted in his report (the first document below); however, he found feeding sign in the Mack’s Bayou area and suggested that at least two more birds remained, one at Mack’s Bayou and another in Greenlea Bend. As I read the report, Tanner referenced Bick’s observation in August ’41 (discussed here), and the context suggests that he related it to the John’s Bayou family. Other interpretations are possible, including that this was another family group that was passing through the area, which would mean that the remaining 1941 population was even larger.

In Ghost Birds, Steven Lyn Bales provides a full accounting of Tanner’s population estimates, but earlier books by Hoose and Jackson gloss over the likely presence of the other birds. Hoose (p. 120) wrote that James and Nancy Tanner “maybe heard a third” at Mack’s Bayou. (The source of this information is not identified.) Jackson (p. 132) has Nancy Tanner seeing a male and a female in December 1941. Both Bales and Hoose are clear that she saw the pair in 1940; per Bales, the actual date was December 21.

While there’s no way of knowing whether the birds Bick saw were the John’s Bayou family, I suspect that they were. I also think it’s reasonable to infer, as Tanner did, that this group bred successfully in 1941 (possibly an important point given the disturbance to the habitat). If Bick’s birds were the ones from John’s Bayou, it seems the male disappeared sometime between mid-August and December. Given the consistent presence of this family group in the vicinity for nearly a decade, there’s perhaps a hint of wishful thinking in Tanner’s suggestion that the male “might have moved away” due to the logging.

The next interesting tidbits come from a 1938 interim report that Tanner sent to the Audubon Society, under the terms of his fellowship (the document below and accompanying map). The report includes a reference to a non-breeding pair in the Mack’s Bayou area. This pair does not show up in Tanner’s published counts, either in the monograph or in his dissertation. It seems possible that Tanner concluded the pair that was seen around Mack’s Bayou and the pair with two young that Kuhn found later were one and the same, erring on the side of caution in his final population estimates.

What stands out in both of these documents is the difficulty Tanner and Kuhn faced when trying to find ivorybills other than the John’s Bayou family. This is a topic I’ve touched on in several other posts because of the common belief, fostered by Tanner in later years and advanced by many 21st-century “skeptics”, that ivorybills should be easy to find.

During his brief, two week visit in 1941, Tanner couldn’t get to Greenlea Bend at all and didn’t find the Mack’s Bayou bird, although he found evidence that it was still there. The 1938 report illustrates how hard it was to find ivorybills even more explicitly. Kuhn and Tanner were unable to locate a pair that had been seen by others in a fairly circumscribed area, although it’s possible that Kuhn happened on this pair and the young of the year on June 15th.

Beyond that, it took Tanner and Kuhn “two or three weeks” to find an ivorybill in an area where there was “an abundance of feeding sign”, and Kuhn only found the bird in question by following it to the feeding sign from a known roost. It seems that, while ivorybills may sometimes have been “noisy and conspicuous”, they were for the most part quite the opposite.

Materials are courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.