“You never know when you get up in the morning what earthshaking event might take place and change your life forever. For me, a chain of life-altering events began when I checked my e-mail one day in February 2004.”

— The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher

For CSULB alumnus Tim Gallagher, that e-mail alerted him to a possible sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird native to the southeast United States thought to be extinct.

Gallagher, director of publications at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology and editor-in-chief of its Living Bird magazine, made headlines this April when the lab announced that he and a colleague had seen an ivory-bill in an Arkansas swamp last year.

“I’d always been interested in ornithology since I was a kid,” said Gallagher, who earned a B.A. in magazine journalism in 1979 and an M.A. in English in 1983. The long-time nature writer and photographer worked for several outdoor magazines, at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and as a freelancer before joining Cornell in 1990.

A love of writing narrative non-fiction led him to begin working on a book about the ivory-billed woodpecker. “I wanted to know why people are so fascinated with this bird,” he remarked.

He interviewed people who had seen the bird in the 1930s and ’40s when it was still known to exist, as well as investigated more recent purported sightings, which were largely met with skepticism in the ornithology community since no one could provide photos to back up their claims. Then came the tip from another birder who came across a message from outdoorsman Gene Sparling.

Sparling was a wilderness kayaker who “happened to go explore Bayou de View in eastern Arkansas and wrote about his trip on a canoe club listserv. He mentioned in the eighth or ninth paragraph about this unusual woodpecker he saw. His sighting was as good as some of these that I had been checking out 30 or 40 years after the fact, and it was only six days old, so I was really excited,” Gallagher explained.

Gallagher accompanied Sparling and Professor Bobby Harrison of Oakwood College in Alabama back to Arkansas. “On the second day [Feb. 27, 2004], Bobby and I had a real close flyby of this bird and that’s really where all this started. I had to come back and tell the scientists at Cornell basically that I’d seen a Sasquatch. It started this huge search, which is ongoing.”

An intensive 14-month study involving representatives of Cornell, the Nature Conservancy and other organizations culminated in a nationally publicized press conference, an article in the journal Science and completion of Gallagher’s book, The Grail Bird.

Despite carefully chronicling what they consider bona fide sightings, the research team has yet to capture irrefutable photographic evidence of the ivory-bill’s existence, which led one group of ornithologists to write a paper skeptical of the Cornell findings. But when they were given a sneak preview of sound recordings from the search area, they withdrew their paper and enthusiastically embraced the rediscovery of the ivory-bill. Efforts are under way to preserve thousands of additional acres of Arkansas habitat.

To learn more, visit www.birds.cornell.edu.

— Anne Ambrose