Yesterday I visited my great uncle, had lunch with him and after we sat on the porch drinking a adult beverage. I started picking his brain about log sets in the swamp. He was going into detail about how he used to use #11s on logs and he said the best thing to cover them with is "doodle dust" (the fine wood dust that you find in rotten trees). Then he said something that made my heart skip a beat...."The best doodle dust came from the tree where one of them lord gods was nesting." Now the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was called that, so I asked him to tell me about the "lord god". He described the Ivory Billed Woodpecker exactly how they looked, flew and he even did the call of one with his mouth.
I got him talking about the Ivory Bill and he went into great detail about them. He said they didn't die out in the swamp where he lives until the mid 1950's. He told about how he would hunt with his dad and afterwards his father would ask if he heard "dem lord gods calling". He explained in detail of how the birds would remove the bark around the hole where they nested and how they would call to each other. I was in total shock, it was talking to someone who had seen a wooly mammoth. But he also used to hang out with his grandmother who, as a little girl, would smuggle supplies to the local partisan fighters during the Civil War.
Today I'm still in shock that I know someone that actually saw a bird, not a one time thing, but a common occurrence, that many today say are extinct. Still in amazement.
