Creature record / 1971
1971. The Atchafalaya Swamp of southern Louisiana. A duck hunter with a cheap Kodak Instamatic camera took two pictures. A woodpecker on a tree trunk. Then another tree. The same stiff posture. It looked like a male ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird with no uncontested sighting since 1944. The snapshots reached George H. Lowery Jr. of Louisiana State University. That summer he showed them to the American Ornithologists' Union. He was ridiculed. A mounted specimen, the critics said. Lowery never revealed the photographer's name. Decades later, Tim Gallagher found him. Fielding Lewis. Today, the grainy images are cited as possibly genuine.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was a bird of the great southern swamps. Shiny deep black, with white on the neck and wings, and a pure white bill. The last uncontested sighting came in 1944. George H. Lowery Jr. had seen one himself, in 1935, in the Singer Tract near Tallulah, Louisiana. By 1971 he was the founder and director of the LSU Museum of Natural Science.