The old memories were filled with birds that no longer flew in this sky and creatures that no longer walked this land. The trees were the same, but they didn't range as far, and the waters abided, but they were less abundant. 'If they dwelled in the distant memories of the Big Woods that they'd inherited from their forebears, the place they lived now was barely recognizable.
'Eventually, we all divest ourselves of our foolishness.' p184 For now, each was glad for the other's company, and comforted by the sense that all of this was outside of time, untouched by the noise of the machines that men make to do their bidding.' p119 Time would prove what was and what wasn't. 'They sat in the gentle light of the fire, strangers, but the hint of friendship was there. As searchers armed with cameras and scientific equipment invade the far reaches of the swamps, we also become privy to the inner thoughts and observations of the Lord God Bird himself. When the world finds out about the sighting, scientists and strangers arrive to mount a proper search, and advertisements for everything from Ivory Bill-themed T-shirts to burgers and haircuts start cropping up in the local town. On one such canoe trip, he catches a fleeting glimpse of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker and takes it as a miracle. Set in the vestiges of a small rural community in Big Woods, Arkansas, this elegant, elegiac novel follows a lonely widower who spends his time farming, building wooden canoes, and paddling through the hardwood swamps in solitude. Such are the true events that inspire the fictional story in Tom Gallant’s THE LORD GOD BIRD: A Novel. Due to destruction of its forest habitat, the bird was thought to have become extinct in the mid-twentieth century, until a sighting was reported in Arkansas in 2004.Ī search led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ensued, with a reward of $50,000 offered to anyone who could lead a biologist to a living specimen, but these subsequent investigations failed to confirm the sighting definitively. The Ivory Billed Woodpecker, so breathtaking in appearance that it was often referred to as “The Lord God Bird,” was one of the world’s largest and most majestic woodpeckers.
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