Steve Bodio Reviews Imperial Dreams

    (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher is a natural history of the world’s most spectacular woodpecker and a mystery: a forensic inquiry into what, despite the narrator’s hopes, looks like the death of a species. It starts as a lighthearted adventure and becomes a tragedy and a tale of terror. It may be Gallagher’s best book yet, one to excite adventure travelers who might never pick up a “bird book,” while telling an unforgettable tale of loss.

Several years ago, Gallagher was one of the rediscoverers of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. His success led him to think about its relative, the legendary Imperial Woodpecker (or Pitoreal ) of Mexico. I do not use “legendary” lightly; although the ivory-bill was the largest woodpecker in the United States, the imperial was the largest that ever lived. The raven-sized male, with its red Woody Woodpecker crest, looked like a huge exaggeration of the ivory-bill. But the female had a unique forward-curving black curl recognizable even in pre-Columbian petroglyphs. They knocked such large chunks of bark off dying trees that their sign was unmistakable. Their home was the cold montane pine forests of the Sierra Madre, with grizzly bear, wolf, jaguar, trout, and Thick-billed Parrot, all vanished or vanishing. Though they had been seen on occasion into the 1970s, there were few credible recent reports. Their forests had been cut over by loggers, and were now the virtual property of drug traffickers— the narcotraficantes—whose reign of terror discouraged all outsiders.

Tim Gallagher was born in England, raised in southern California, and is a longtime resident of Ithaca, New York. He is tall, thin, and gray-haired. For such a person to wander the Sierra Madre with pictures of woodpeckers, asking nervous peasants about them, takes either extreme courage or foolhardiness. But that’s just what he did.

The final of his five expeditions started optimistically in Durango, but before they left for the mountains they were “befriended” by an obvious drug dealer, and abandoned by one of the ornithologists who had agreed to accompany them. Despite such omens, they continued.

Tim often digresses in the book to explore the not-too-distant past of the Sierra Madre, telling stories of pioneer anthropologist Carl Lumholtz, and of famed ecologist and essayist Aldo Leopold, who wanted to establish the largest park in Mexico there. He reminds us that the Apaches held out in the Sierra, with bounties on their scalps, until the 1930s. They meet many decent people, though most are wary of these strange outsiders. They see opium poppies, and are warned off more than one trail. The country has been logged, and the forest is second or third growth, with ground plants eaten to stubble by goats and burros. They see one mesa across a chasm that looks like better habitat, but are warned that it belongs to the Zetas—a fearsome drug cartel made up of paramilitaries once part of the Mexican military—who will kill them if they enter. What they do not see is any sign of the woodpecker. They have a device that makes a double-knock sound that mimics the distinctive drumming of the pitoreal and most other woodpeckers in the Campephilus genus, but they never hear a response.

Their drive out of the mountains is a nightmare. The relatively benign drug lord who promised to meet them and accompany them—and warned them not to leave without him—does not show. Without “Carlos” and his Uzi submachine gun, they must drive, unescorted, for a long day over hideous dirt roads, at no more than five miles per hour. They ask a local village elder if it is safe, and he tells them: “Along the road, everything is quiet—the only thing that happened is that a few houses were burned down”—this since they entered, a couple of weeks earlier. They stop for snacks, and the proprietor seems nervous; later they find that a villager had been kidnapped and held for ransom there the day before.

Tim tries to be optimistic about the fate of the pitoreal, as he does about the ivory-bill. Although long-lived individuals may have survived into our time, do they have much future? The Imperial Woodpecker’s fate might seem even grimmer than the ivory-bill’s; the researchers find evidence that loggers repeatedly encouraged shooting and poisoning the bird to ensure its demise. If true, it represents a case of successful, conscious biocide; worse, one done for imaginary reasons—the destruction of trees that were already infested with beetle grubs. Tim’s excellent adventure contains a dark warning for any species that is perceived as an economic threat.

Reviewed in The Nature Conservancy's Science Blog

Here's a new review of Imperial Dreams from Cool Green Science, The Nature Conservancy's science blog.

My latest radio interview

I did a live interview yesterday on WSKG radio's weekly author program, Off the Page, discussing my search for the Imperial Woodpecker in the mountains of northwestern Mexico. Here's a link to the show's webpage, which has a tape of my interview: Off the Page/Imperial Dreams.

Eyewitness Testimony . . .

                (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

Pedro Fimbres was 90 years old when I interviewed him a few years ago, but he had a timeless look about him: tall and thin with brown weathered skin and dark eyes. I could easily picture him as a medieval Spanish nobleman in a castle in Andalusia.

At first we spoke about the Sierra Madre Apaches and his family’s history—his uncle, Francisco Fimbres, had launched a vendetta against the Apaches in the late 1920s after they had killed his wife and kidnapped his infant son, and it was a horrific tale of vengeance and bloodshed. But then I noticed the limb of a tree, riddled with holes, hanging on the wall outside. It was obviously from an Acorn Woodpecker granary tree, where the birds stash their acorns. Pedro told me the limb came in a cord of firewood he had bought several years earlier. He liked the look of it, so he hung it outside his saddle shop.

In the old days when he traveled frequently on horseback in the mountains, Pedro had often seen carpinteros like the ones that bored holes in the limb, and he enjoyed their antics. He talked about his experiences, and it quickly became clear what an excellent observer he was, so I switched my line of questioning from Apaches to woodpeckers. I was eager to find out whether he had ever seen an Imperial Woodpecker or heard anyone talk about them, but I didn’t want to lead the interview or drop any hints about what I was looking for.

I pulled out my woodpecker illustrations and invited him to look through them, asking him if he remembered ever seeing any of them. The first one in the stack was the Acorn Woodpecker.

“Si, si,” he said, pointing at the granary log on his wall and talking animatedly. “El poquito carpintero.”

He paused for a moment when he flipped to the picture of the Lineated Woodpecker, then shook his head. But when he looked at the Imperial Woodpecker, his face lit up. “Ah, si, si. El pitoreal. Carpintero gigante,” he said in an excited singsong voice. He obviously knew the bird well and was genuinely enthusiastic. Pitoreal,” he said again, holding the illustration gleefully. “Muy bonito carpintero.” He gushed about the bird, telling us how beautiful and amazing it was. He had often run across them when he was younger, he said, but only in the high country, in the great mesa pine forests.

They were never common, he said. He sometimes went weeks without seeing any but would then run across a group of five or six or more. They were difficult to miss because they were so noisy, their trumpet-like calls echoing through the forest. And they were very approachable. One time he was traveling on horseback with another man when they came across a group of them. The man told him he had heard that the birds have a diamond bill, and he wanted to shoot one to see if it was true. Pulling out his saddle gun, the man shot one of the woodpeckers, shattering its shoulder and bringing it tumbling to the ground, shrieking loudly in distress. As the two men went to pick up the bird, the other pitoreales flew in, chattering excitedly, just a few feet away. The man wanted to shoot more of them, but Pedro wouldn’t allow it. He could see no point in it.

I was in shock. Not only had I found someone with an intimate knowledge of the Imperial Woodpecker, he had once even held a wounded one in his hands and prevented some others from being shot. He was so lucid and his observations so detailed, providing the kind of scientific data so lacking with this species. He told me these groups of pitoreales were usually about twenty kilometers apart, which gave me a better idea than anything else I’ve read about their population density and how far they ranged in their foraging. And then he told me about how he’d watched some Imperial Woodpeckers raid the granary of some Acorn Woodpeckers. The huge woodpeckers would pry off the bark of the tree with their massive pearl-white bills, he said, sending acorns raining to the ground, then drop down to eat them as the tiny Acorn Woodpeckers flew around, furiously protesting the theft.

And it was clear his testimony was real. These mountains are so isolated. Few people living in the Sierra Madre have read anything about birds. All they have is their own observations. This made it all the more clear to me how important it was to continue my interviews. The Imperial Woodpecker was never adequately studied by science. Anything that can be found out now, while a few of these witnesses to the Imperial Woodpecker still live, adds vital data to our knowledge of this species. And if by some miracle these interviews led me to a pair of the birds, still nesting in some remote corner of the Sierra Madre, I thought, perhaps the species could yet be rescued from extinction.

What do Imperial Woodpeckers and Apaches Have in Common?

The answer is that the Sierra Madre Occidental was the final stronghold and sanctuary for both of them. The Apaches in many ways were the protectors of the Imperial Woodpeckers—or at least protectors of the habitat the birds needed to survive. For more than two centuries, the Apaches' ferocious defense of their domain in the mountains of northwestern Mexico deterred the settlement and exploitation of the vast old-growth forests where the Imperials lived. 

In the photograph above, Geronimo (at right) poses with three of his warriors at a time when they were still at war with the United States and Mexico. After their skirmishes with cavalry or settlers, they would often vanish into the high country of the Sierra Madre, leaving their pursuers in the dust. When Geronimo finally surrendered in 1886, some Apaches refused to join him and fled back to their Sierra Madre stronghold, where they fought a losing battle well into the 1930s, trying to preserve their traditional culture. It was only after the Apaches were subdued that logging companies were able to fully exploit the old-growth timber in their vast domain.

An interesting sidenote about the photograph above: In the mid-1930s, Yahnozah (the warrior on the far left), led Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad on a lengthy search through the Sierra Madre, hoping to locate some of his fellow Apaches who had fled there nearly half a century earlier. They saw several Imperial Woodpeckers during the expedition.

The Largest Woodpecker That Ever Lived

It’s amazing to see the difference in size between Imperial, Ivory-billed, and Pileated woodpeckers, which Bobby Harrison captured well in this photo he took of some specimens at the American Museum of Natural History. A whopping two feet in length, the Imperial easily dwarfs its closest cousin, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (center). As for the common Pileated Woodpecker (top)—well, it doesn’t even come close.

The first time I ever saw some Imperial Woodpecker specimens, during a visit to Harvard’s bird collection, I was stunned by their beauty and majesty. I knew right then that I would someday go off in search of these birds. There were so many questions to answer about them. Why had they vanished so quickly and completely? Were they already extinct? Or were they still hanging on in some of the remotest reaches of Mexico’s mighty Sierra Madre? And most important, could they be saved?

    (Photo by Bobby Harrison)

These were a few of the questions I hoped to address when I began my quest. I had planned to start searching nearly a decade ago, but my friends in Mexico kept telling me that it was too dangerous at the moment, because of all the drug-growing activity and violence in the mountains, and I should try the following year instead. But each year, the level of danger seemed to grow astronomically. I finally decided I couldn’t wait any longer—the Imperial Woodpecker couldn’t wait any longer—and one bright, sunny morning in May, I crossed the border at Columbus, New Mexico, and headed south to the Sierra Madre.