Now in paperback . . .

I'm pleased to announce that Simon & Schuster has just released a new paperback edition of Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre, about my perilous travels in the drug lands of northern Mexico in search of the world's rarest bird. The Imperial Woodpecker is a giant—the largest woodpecker that ever lived—and the closest relative of the famed Ivory-billed Woodpecker of the American South. Many believe the Imperial Woodpecker is extinct, but I set out to see if any of them might yet exist in the remotest reaches of the high-mountain mesa pine forests of Mexico. 

Imperial Woodpecker talk in Kentucky

I'll be giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Ornithological Society on Saturday, September 20, 2014, at 7:00 p.m. at Lake Barkley State Resort Park in Cadiz, Kentucky.  The meeting is open to everyone. I'll be talking about my search for the Imperial Woodpecker in the mountains of northwestern Mexico. I hope my friends from Kentucky and nearby states will join me. My old Ivory-billed Woodpecker searching friend Bobby Harrison—who joined me on one of the expeditions to Mexico and on many trips through the southern swamps—has promised to be there, so it should be an interesting evening. For more information, send an email to kistlers@scrtc.com or visit the KOS website.

Ten Years After

February 27, 2004; Bayou de View, Arkansas—It is shortly after one o'clock on a clear afternoon in late winter as we paddle our canoe down the bayou, me in the bow and Bobby Harrison in the stern. Gene Sparling is up ahead somewhere in his kayak, looking for the place where, less than two weeks earlier, he'd seen a huge black-and-white woodpecker that fit the description of an Ivory-bill.



From left to right, Gene Sparling, Bobby Harrison, and Tim Gallagher at Bayou de View on February 27, 2004, shortly after the Ivory-bill sighting.

As we move slowly with the current, transfixed by the movement of the murky brown swamp water, we both catch sight of a large bird flying up a side slough toward us. It's one of those things you pick up in your peripheral vision and without even thinking about it your mind runs through the possibilities—large, swift flying, black and white. 

Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Larry Chandler.

And then it bursts into full view right in front of you, exposing the

deepest, darkest black coloration, but what really catches your eye are the snow-white trailing edges of its wings, the unmistakeable field marks of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. And just as it pulls up to land on the trunk of a tupelo less than 100 feet away, you both shout simultaneously, "Ivory-bill!" And the bird veers away into the woods, landing a couple of times on the backs of tupelo trunks and then continuing on as you ram your canoe into the side of the bayou, jumping out and abandoning it while you struggle to move as fast as you can through the muck and mire, scrambling over huge fallen logs, tearing your clothes on broken branches and shrubbery. And fifteen minutes later, practically in cardiac arrest from the excitement and sheer exertion of the chase, you collapse against a massive fallen tree as Bobby sobs, "I saw an Ivory-bill...I saw an Ivory-bill."

And all these years later, on the 10th anniversary of this sighting, the moment is still so vivid, so amazing, so unlike anything you've ever experienced, your heart still races whenever you think about it.

At the very spot we saw the Ivory-bill, 10 years to the minute later,   I drink a toast with Bobby—unfortunately it's Mountain Dew, not Champagne. (Photo by Clara Gallagher)

Bobby Harrison discusses the February 27, 2004, Ivory-bill sighting in George Butler's documentary, The Lord God Bird. Here's a link to an 8-minute clip from the film that has interviews with Gene Sparling, Bobby Harrison, and Tim Gallagher.

Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" interviews Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison for a segment that aired in 2005. Here's a link to the archived program. (Photo by Ron Rohrbaugh)

Another great review for Imperial Dreams

From Colleen Mondor's Chasing Ray blog:

Imperial Dreams makes Top 10 Science & Health Books of 2013 list

I just heard that my latest book, Imperial Dreams, was one of the books chosen for Booklist's Top 10 Science & Health Books of 2013 list. I was honored to be on the same list as E. O. Wilson and the other authors. The reviewer said, "Gallagher sets the gold standard for nature writing in this chronicle of his search for the possibly extinct imperial woodpecker in Mexican territory held by drug traffickers."

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.

Speaking in Texas next week

I hope all of my Texas birding friends will come to my talk about the Imperial Woodpecker next Thursday at the World Birding Center at Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen, Texas. The talk begins at 6:00 p.m. on October 17. For more information, call (956) 681-3370. A map is pasted below.

An upcoming talk at Montezuma Audubon in Savannah, New York.

Nature of Montezuma Lecture 

Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre

Saturday, October 5, 2013
2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

In the vast mountain pine forests of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental lived a bird like not other—a spectacular giant woodpecker, two feet in length, largest of its clan that ever lived. With the deepest black plumage and brilliant snow-white feathers that show as a white shield on its back, the Imperial Woodpecker is the closest relative of America's famed Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The last documented sighting of an Imperial Woodpecker took place in 1956, and yet rumors still persist among the mountain villagers that this bird still lives in the remotest reaches of this mighty mountain range. Join award-winning author and wildlife photographer Tim Gallagher at the Montezuma Audubon Center (2295 State Route 89, Savannah, New York) for a fascinating program as he shares his adventures in search of this enigmatic ghost bird. Fee: $3.00/child, $5.00/ adult, and $15/family. Free for Friends of the Montezuma Wetlands Complex. Space is limited. Registration required. Call (315) 365-3588 or email montezuma@audubon.org.

What the Ivory-billed Woodpecker said:

                   (From a 1912 children's book)

My latest radio interview . . .

I was a guest on Ray Brown's Boston-based Talkin' Birds radio show yesterday. Here's a link to a recording of the show. My interview starts 9:50 minutes into the recording.

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.

Imperial Dreams Reviewed in Audubon Magazine

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.

Reviewed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Imperial Dreams reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

The Birder’s Holy Grail

The Imperial Woodpecker—at two feet tall, the largest woodpecker that ever lived—has not been seen in more than half a century.

By Julie Zickefoose

She’s there in a 1957-era ornithologist’s film, tossing her springy curled crest, whacking away at scaly pine bark and hitching vigorously up a tree. She is an imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker who ever lived: almost 2 feet tall; jet black and snow white, with a staring doll’s eye, a Kewpie crest and an oversize bone-colored bill, stuck like an awl in a surprised-looking face. And she is, sadly, one of the last of her kind: No one has spotted an imperial woodpecker in the half-century since the film was made.

Even though Tim Gallagher reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker, the imperial woodpecker’s northern cousin, fly across Arkansas’s Bayou De View in 2004 (and wrote a 2006 book, “The Grail Bird,” about his quest), you're aware from the get-go that his hunt for the imperial woodpecker in Mexico won't be a saga of discovery. There won’t be a photo of an oversize, pied woodpecker on the book’s cover, just an artist's rendering. Instead, “Imperial Dreams” is more along the lines of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard.” It’s yearning, put into words and wistfully unrequited.

Sheer precipices abound in northern Mexico’s Sierra Madre, but drug dealers known as narcotraficantes have turned this place into a foreboding nightmare landscape. It's there, in remnant old-growth pine savanna, that Mr. Gallagher seeks his dream bird, leaving home and family for five expeditions through one of Earth’s most dangerous mountain ranges. This is where Geronimo surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles in 1886; where Pancho Villa looted William Randolph Hearst’s ranch; where the Tarahumara Indians, those fabled light-footed, long-distance runners, clung to their lifestyle well into the 20th century. Today it is a barely modernized place of adobe huts and wandering burros; the explorers’ trucks jolt along two-track roads are faster walked than driven.

Mr. Gallagher paints vivid pictures of an impoverished populace under the thumb of the rapacious drug lords, who log illegally to clear patches for opium and marijuana, who kill indiscriminately and without legal consequence to maintain their duchies. In one harrowing passage, Mr. Gallagher and his friends ride in a narcotraficante’s pickup, having fallen into nervous collaboration with him in their quest for access to unlogged forest. As I read, I wondered why the author was going through it all, and wondered again and again as he rattled his teeth in old vehicles and collapsed from dehydration and exhaustion, or dodged thieves and druglords’ spies, always chasing an ornithological phantasm.

The imperial woodpecker, like its smaller American cousin, the ivory-billed woodpecker, is almost certainly gone. These majestic Mexican birds were deliberately persecuted, with loggers shooting them and even poisoning the trees upon which they fed, under the false belief that the imperial woodpeckers damaged valuable timber. Yet the inaccessibility of what mature pine forest remains lures Mr. Gallagher ever onward—perhaps a pair or two still cling to life in these high cold mountains. He seeks out village elders who remember seeing the woodpeckers, each anecdote of their encounters throwing a little more propellant on his all-consuming fire. Finally, he must be content not with seeing the bird for himself but simply with speaking with those aging eyewitnesses who knew it. As his role subtly shifts from explorer to recorder, he loosens his obsessive determination to find the bird, relegating himself to a reporter’s role and readying himself for an eventual escape from an underworld of fantasy and desire.

I’m glad that there are people in this world like Tim Gallagher: people who leave their armchairs, sweat bullets at armed roadblocks, and eat cold sardines, beans and noodles so the rest of us can marvel at their adventures. I’m glad that Mr. Gallagher is a wonderful storyteller and deeply knowledgeable ornithologist, who also has the nerve of a military commando. Every time I put this book down, I picked it up again to take in just one more chapter, lured onward by the same tantalizing bits of evidence that kept Mr. Gallagher going. Aghast at the risks he was taking, I was caught by the scimitar-clawed grip of the world's largest woodpecker on his—and my—imagination.

Speaking in Ithaca on May 15, 2013

I hope some of my Ithaca-area friends will attend my talk on Monday, May 15, at 6:00 p.m. at the Tompkins County Public Library. Copies of Imperial Dreams will be on sale at the event. Details below:

Imperial Dreams in Cornell Alumni Magazine

From the latest issue of BirdWatching . . .

Back to the Bayou . . .

After my Imperial Woodpecker talk at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock yesterday, I saw my old Ivory-billed Woodpecker chasing friends Bobby Harrison (center) and David Luneau (right). As soon as the event was over, Bobby and I blasted to Bayou de View in eastern Arkansas and spent the rest of the day canoeing through the swamp forest, revisiting the site where we'd seen an ivory-bill nine years ago.

Upcoming appearances . . .

I have several Imperial Woodpecker talks and book signings this month. 

This Friday, April 12, I'll be the keynote speaker at the Viera Wetlands Nature Festival, in Melbourne, Florida. Dinner starts at 6:00 p.m., and my talk is at 7:00. The event takes place at the Holiday Inn Melbourne-Viera Hotel & Conference Center, 8298 N. Wickham Road, Melbourne, Florida.

The following week, on Saturday, April 20, I'll be taking part in the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock. I'll be speaking at 10:00 a.m. that day at the Witt Stevens Central Arkansas Nature Center. The previous evening at 8:00 I'll be at an author event that's open to the public.

I'm presenting a Monday-night Seminar about the Imperial Woodpecker at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on April 29 at 7:30 p.m.

I'll be giving a reading at the Spring Writes Literary Festival in Ithaca, New York, on Sunday, May 5, at 5:00 p.m. (Buffalo Street Books, 215 N. Cayuga Street, Ithaca, New York 14850; telephone: 607-273-8246)