Lord God Bird

The ivory-billed woodpecker seems to flicker in and out of existence, vanishing for decades at a time and then reappearing, joining the list of what J. Drew Lanham calls “Gone Birds” and then, some say, revealing itself once more. Lanham, a lifelong birder, lingers with the mystery of the so-called Lord God Bird, considering the bird’s coexistence with centuries of American violence and the benefits of living with mystery.

Does the Lord God bird still exist? That’s the brass-tacks, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road question. There’s possibility and there’s probability. Science proffers the latter and poetry the former. I tend both sides of the coin. I am also a southern Black man. This means my perspective gets flipped in odd ways. I’ve loved birds for most of my sixty years. The bobwhite quail, flushing and calling during my daily migrations between my grandmother’s early twentieth-century life and my parents’ mid-century modern life, was my introduction to a lifelong avian codependency. Not just the quail shadowed in thickets, but the barred owls calling from the creek bottom, the snow birds gathering on bare winter ground, and the rain crows forecasting summer storms. I came to know them as friends I could count on.