Visitor from Britain Praises Rock Creek Park

Michael McCarthy recently visited DC and spent some time birding in Rock Creek Park. He has great things to say about the birders and birds that he encountered there, especially its resident Pileated Woodpeckers.

I went there to talk to the Rock Creek birders, men and women who gather in the park every morning at 7am (it's a long story: I was researching a book). The birders were fascinating – a nuclear physicist, a neurology professor, a classical guitarist – but the unfamiliar birds excited me even more, Acadian flycatchers, ovenbirds, various warblers, and most of all, a pileated woodpecker. This is a monstrous great thing: its dagger-like black, white and scarlet head makes you think of a pterodactyl. But even more gripping is that it is the closest living relative to its even bigger cousin, the ivory-billed woodpecker, which is extinct. Or is it?

In 2005 a group of senior US ornithologists made the sensational claim, in a paper published in Science, that they had rediscovered America's most legendary bird in a remote corner of Arkansas. Their evidence is far from conclusive: the supporting video is fuzzy in the extreme, and many scientists have since claimed it shows not an ivory-bill, but a pileated (the species are fairly similar). Others remain convinced that the ivory-bill is still out there, deep in the backwoods.

There is a powerful need to believe it; huge and spectacular, this mysterious creature is the stuff of dreams. (It was known as the Lord God Bird, from the expression people uttered on first glimpsing it). I think part of what made seeing the pileated woodpecker so special was what you might call, even if at one remove, an ivory bill thrill.