On May 8, 1837, John James Audubon landed at the town of Houston, Texas. Of the many birds that he noted hearing and seeing during the time he visited the town was the Ivory-billed woodpecker. The bird was “very abundant along the finely wooded margins of that singular stream, called Buffalo Bayou.” The singular stream begins just west of Houston and has become a series of mostly reservoirs and channels that flows through the heart of Houston until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Runoff from insecticides, pesticides, and litany of other pollutants allow barely any form of life to survive in Buffalo Bayou let alone support wildlife along the margins.
The nickname that John James Audubon gave the Ivory-billed woodpecker was “Vandyke” in honor of the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). “The broad extent of its dark glossy body and tail, the large and well-defined white markings of its wings, neck, and bill, relieved by the rich carmine of the pendent crest of the male, and the brilliant yellow of its eye, have never failed to remind me of some of the boldest and noblest productions of that inimitable artist’s pencil.” Mark Catesby (1683-1749) and Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) also documented and produced drawings of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. Almost no one else has. Timber cutting, fire suppression, agriculture, and industrialization left the Ivory-billed woodpecker with no alternative but extinction. The last photographs of the Ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) were taken in a tract of forest in Louisiana in 1935.