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.

Life in the Sierra Madre

    (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

More than a decade into the 21st century, most people in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental still live simple lives, often making do without electricity, plumbing, telephones or other modern conveniences. They live in rough-hewn log cabins, cut from the surrounding pine forest, or in adobe huts, made of clay bricks, shaped by hand and dried in the sun. Most get around on foot or ride mules. These were the people we sought out in our search for the Imperial Woodpecker.

     (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

   (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

Imperial Dreams Sneak Peek

I just received two advance copies of my new book, Imperial Dreams, which goes on sale in hardback and electronic editions on April 16, 2013. For me, it's always exciting to see the completed version of a new book. After months—or years, in this case—of writing and rewriting a manuscript, proofreading it again and again, then going through the galleys and the uncorrected proofs, etc., etc. And then, finally, everything is done, and it's time to write the next book. I hope everyone enjoys it.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

As far as we know, the only place the Imperial Woodpecker has ever existed is in the high-country pine forests of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental—a vast mountain range a couple of hundred miles wide and nearly a thousand miles long, stretching southward from just below the U.S. border—and a small section of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt at the southern end of this range. It is rugged, remote, and dangerous, and it always has been. Everyone from the Aztecs and Spaniards to the modern Mexican government has found it impossible to maintain order there. The mountains are high and cut through with deep barrancas or canyons—one of which is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

It is there that the last wild Apaches held on well into the 1930s, in roving bands, still attacking settlers who encroached on their land. And there that the Tarahumara (or Raramuri)—those magnificent long-distance runners who think nothing of racing 150 miles nonstop through the mountains—resisted all Spanish efforts to colonize them and maintained their stone-age existence for centuries. It has always been a land of dreamers and desperados, many of whom fled south on the Old Outlaw Trail after robbing banks or committing various other acts of mayhem in the United States. 

    (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

The current desperados are mostly drug traffickers, who grow and transport opium and marijuana, supported by well-armed thugs. They're the ones who make it so dangerous to travel through remote areas of the Sierra. In the photo above, the Tepehuane man is warning us not to cross to the other side of the canyon, which is controlled by Los Zetas, a drug cartel made up of trained paramilitaries who left the Mexican military to engage in the lucrative drug trade. 

                            (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

The dreamers are the ones who come to the Sierra Madre in search of treasure, be it lost caches of Spanish gold, long-forgotten mines, lost tribes, or, in my case, the mighty Imperial Woodpecker. But these are not the only treasures the Sierra Madre holds. It is one of the most beautiful areas I've ever seen, with endless spectacular vistas of pine-clad mountains cut through with magnificent canyons. And it also has fascinating people, most of whom live without electricity, telephones, plumbing, or any of the other things we all take for granted. It's a valuable experience to step back from the urban world once in a while and see how the majority of humanity lives.

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.

Imperial Woodpeckers of the Sierra Madre

In the high mountains of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental there once lived a woodpecker unlike any other—a giant, largest of its clan in the world, whose pounding drumbeat echoed like the blows of a wild axe man through the primeval forests as it bored into massive, grub-infested pines, hammering on them powerfully for weeks at time until they groaned, shuddered, and finally toppled with an impact that shook the ground. Victorian explorers dubbed it Campephilus imperialis—the Imperial Woodpecker. But it had already been named long before. To the Aztecs, it was cuauhtotomi; to the Tarahumaras, cumecocari; to the Tepehuanes, ua gam; and to the Spanish speakers, the pitoreal.

      (Illustration by John Schmitt)

Two feet in length, with the deepest black plumage and brilliant, snow-white flight feathers that showed as a white shield on its lower back, the Imperial Woodpecker was impossible to miss. Its eyes glowed golden yellow; its massive, chisel-like bill shone white as polished ivory; its feathery crest curved forward to a shaggy point. And it was noisy, blaring a loud trumpet-like toot as it hitched up a pine trunk, foraging for beetle grubs as big as a man’s thumb. But its showiness was its undoing—that and the fact that it stayed in tight family groups and often hung around, curious, when one of its group was wounded or killed.

The last documented sighting of the species was a lone female filmed by William Rhein in 1956. This was the only photographic documentation ever made of a living Imperial Woodpecker. Many biologists have already written the Imperial Woodpecker’s epitaph, and it is a sad tale of massive habitat destruction and wanton killing. But stories still persist of lone pitoreales flying yet over the most remote pine forests of the Sierra Madre.

I began searching the Sierra Madre for Imperial Woodpeckers about five years ago and interviewing people who remembered seeing them. It was a tough process. The area has become a major center of drug growing. It is remote and often dangerous as you run into AK-47-toting drug traffickers.

I’ll be posting photos I took and stories of the people I encountered in my travels through the Sierra. I have a book coming out later this year titled, Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre, which I’ll say more about as it gets closer to its release date. I invite anyone who has seen an Imperial Woodpecker (even if it was decades ago) or knows someone who’s seen one to contact me.