I've always loved the story of William Rhein—the
indefatigable Imperial Woodpecker searcher who launched three self-funded
expeditions into the vast Sierra Madre of Mexico in the 1950s to try to
document these remarkable birds as they hovered even then at the edge of
extinction. I sometimes wonder why he did it. Rhein had an excellent income
from his dental practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; a nice home; and no
children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves in every way.
But instead he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two
months at a time, roughing it in the outback of Mexico, living on beans, booze,
and tortillas.
(Photo
by Frederick K. Hilton)
Bill Rhein
(at right, above) with his friends George and Walter Kohler in the Sierra Madre
in 1953, during the first of three expeditions in search of the Imperial
Woodpecker.
Of course, it was a great adventure. These guys
were World War II veterans, and perhaps they missed the thrills, danger, and
sense of camaraderie they'd experienced in combat. And bird study was a
lifelong obsession with Rhein. Although he did not have a degree in ornithology,
he was an ornithologist to the core—and also a gifted bird photographer and
cinematographer. Rhein's lucrative dental practice provided all the funds and
time he needed to do anything he wanted, and the Imperial Woodpecker was the
ideal species for an obsessive quest—a bird that had barely been studied and
never photographed alive. Perhaps it was the challenge of accomplishing
something that had never been done that spurred him on.
In the course of working on Imperial Dreams, I was fortunate enough
to interview two surviving members of Rhein’s expeditions—Frederick K. Hilton
(who went with him in 1953) and Dick Heintzelman (who went in 1956)—and they
filled me in on the details of the expeditions and shared their photographs
with me.
The first thing Rhein did to prepare for his expedition
was to visit famed Cornell professor Arthur A. Allen (founder of the Cornell
Lab of Ornithology), who had searched for Imperial Woodpeckers in 1946.
Allen—along with his wife Elsa and 20-year-old son David—had spent six weeks in
Mexico, driving the atrocious mountain roads in a station wagon and a sedan,
both laden to the gunwales with camera and sound-recording equipment. They
actually located one of the birds, a lone female, but were unable to photograph
it or make a sound recording. Allen was generous to Rhein, providing him with maps,
advice on where to go, and the names of people to contact in Mexico. He even
loaned Rhein a huge parabolic microphone and a wire recorder (an early
sound-recording device that recorded sound onto thin steel wire) in case he got
a chance to document the bird’s voice, which had also never been done.
Rhein and three of his friends loaded up his Chevy
panel truck with all of their gear and headed south in the late spring of 1953,
driving all the way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the city of Durango, Mexico,
some 2,500 miles away. Although they struck out in the first two areas they
explored, the men eventually found several Imperial Woodpeckers (including a
pair with two young) near Los Laureles, a tiny village in the high country of
Durango.
(Photo by
Frederick K. Hilton)
Walter Kohler looks at a fallen tree where seconds earlier three Imperial Woodpeckers had been foraging.
Some of the local people were suspicious of the
strange equipment they carried, such as the odd-looking metal parabola, which
was bigger around than a sledding disk, and the wire recorder. This was in the
early days of the nuclear age, and some of them suspected the Americans were
searching for uranium.
The sound-recording equipment proved to be
impractical for the job at hand. They brought along six truck batteries to
power the setup, which did not allow them the mobility they needed to follow an
Imperial Woodpecker closely and record its call—which is too bad; no recording
of the bird’s voice exists, and no one has ever had a better chance to record
it than Rhein and his friends. They
were also unable to take still photographs or film footage on this or their
follow-up expedition in 1954
On
his third and final expedition to Mexico in 1956, Rhein finally successfully
documented an Imperial Woodpecker, capturing a variety of behaviors on 85
seconds of 16mm Kodachrome motion-picture film. But unfortunately, the film
didn’t meet Rhein’s strict professional standards, and he kept it to himself
for decades. He had filmed the segment from the back of a mule as the
woodpecker hung around, flying from tree to tree in a circle, and occasionally
foraging.
Clips from
William Rhein’s 1956 footage of a female Imperial Woodpecker.
The world might very well never have learned about
Rhein’s Imperial Woodpecker film if not for the efforts of my colleague Martjan
Lammertink, who tracked down Rhein and interviewed him less than two years
before his death. Martjan had read a letter in the Cornell archives that Rhein
had written to woodpecker researcher James Tanner in the early 1960s, in which
he had briefly mentioned the Imperial Woodpecker footage he shot in Mexico. Martjan
was living in the Netherlands at the time, but the next time he came to
America, he tracked down Rhein at his home in Pennsylvania.
Rhein and his wife greeted Martjan warmly and invited
him inside. Later, they sat down in the living room and Rhein set up his old
16mm projector and screen and began running the film. Martjan had the foresight
to turn on a tape recorder as he sat with them as the projector rolled. Pat
Leonard at the Cornell Lab has put together some of Rhein’s best footage and
used the conversation between Rhein and his wife and Martjan as a voiceover. You
can view it here:
I love hearing the comments of Rhein and his wife.
Neither of them had viewed the film in decades. As for Martjan, he was stunned.
Although it only ran a total of 85 seconds, the film was far better than he could
ever have imagined. The bird was easily identifiable and engaged in a variety
of behaviors—flying, foraging, hitching up a tree. It holds a goldmine of information
about a species that has barely been studied. To this day, it is the only
photographic documentation ever made of an Imperial Woodpecker, and its
importance cannot be overstated.
