The ivory-billed woodpecker has been called “Lord God Bird,” for its massive size; “Grail Bird,” for the fervor with which people seek it; and “Ghost Bird,” for the way it hovers on the murky edge between existence and extinction. But Cornell ornithologist Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird, calls it “Lazarus Bird,” after the story of Jesus resurrecting his friend Lazarus four days after he died.
Growing up in the church, I was never sure what to do with resurrection. My father’s faith didn’t emphasize the idea that Christ died for my salvation, or that Christ’s believers would be raised from the dead, but these beliefs were everywhere — in the hymns we sang in the various United Methodist churches where he served as pastor, in the creed we recited every Sunday: I believe in ... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
From my seat in the pews, the promise of everlasting life rang hollow. I did not expect decomposed bodies of believers would one day be reconstituted, nor did I see this as desirable for myself or the people I loved. But metaphorical interpretations of resurrection also fell short: A body raised symbolically from the dead is still very much dead. In graduate school, I read about Thomas Jefferson’s excision of miracles, including the resurrection, from his Bible with a sense of relief. The stories I couldn’t believe literally or understand figuratively, could be simply cut away. But as I’ve grown older, these stories resist neat excision. To dismiss resurrection entirely feels increasingly fraught: Why did faith matter if it did not transform real bodies, real lives, here on earth?
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Tentative belief
THE IVORY-BILL WAS presumed extinct by 1924, when Cornell ornithologist Arthur Allen and his wife Elsa saw a pair in Florida. The following decade, Allen led a team that made the only known recording of the bird’s call and took photographs and video of the ivory-bill. Jim Tanner, who went on that trip, published his doctoral thesis on the ivory-bill in the mid-1930s and estimated around 12 remaining pairs. The last universally accepted sighting was in 1944, when the Audubon Bird Guide illustrator Don Eckelberry spent two weeks in Louisiana following and painting a female ivory-bill that he observed flying through a cutover forest, landing on her roosting tree at sunset, calling out with no answer.
In The Grail Bird, Gallagher interviewed people claiming to have seen an ivory-bill. Most of the reports Gallagher investigated were decades old — too distant to inspire much hope for the bird’s continued existence — until 2004 when he heard about a man named Gene Sparling who claimed to have seen an ivory-bill in Arkansas just a week earlier. Gallagher and his friend and fellow birder Bobby Harrison met up with Sparling in a scrawny stretch of swamp. A few days into their search, a large, black-and-white woodpecker flew through the trees in front of their boat. Gallagher and Harrison “both cried out simultaneously,” Gallagher wrote, “‘Ivory-bill!’” Before they spoke to each other, Gallagher and Harrison took separate field notes, writing nearly identical descriptions of a large black bird with white marks on the trailing edge of its wings. When Harrison called his wife and told her the news, he broke down in tears.
Gallagher knew they’d need evidence before they could tell anyone. Paradoxically, the people whose sightings are the most readily believed tend to be the most tentative, telling only a select few, or doing so anonymously. But when Gallagher returned to Cornell, he insisted that he was “absolutely certain” about what he saw.
Soon teams descended on the Arkansas swamps, searching for evidence. But when the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the ivory-billed woodpecker’s rediscovery, a year after Gallagher’s initial sighting, they were armed with meager evidence: a blurry, four-second video of a bird in flight, several brief sightings by members of the search team who had not been able to get a photograph, and an acoustic recording they claimed to be the distinctive double-rap of the ivory-bill. The team published a cover story in Science and held a press conference to announce that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been discovered in Arkansas.
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that $2.1 million would be devoted to conservation and habitat restoration efforts that might lead to the ivory-bill’s recovery. Groups from Arkansas and Mississippi received nearly $800,000 for private lands conservation. The ivory-bill’s rediscovery was also highlighted on Department of Agriculture promotional materials to encourage participation in programs like the Wetland Reserve Program, which incentivized farmers and landowners to restore wetlands and bottomland forests on private land.
Shortly after Cornell’s announcement, the renowned illustrator David Sibley and three other authors argued in Science that none of the characteristics shown in the four-second video ruled out the possibility that the video shows a pileated woodpecker. An article in The New York Times described the controversy as “downright Talmudic”: The Cornell group claimed that the white patches visible on the bird’s wings in the video were the top of ivory-bill wings, while skeptics claimed these white patches were the bottom of pileated wings.
The audio recordings also came under scrutiny: John Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, acknowledged that the sounds might have been blue jays mimicking the audio recordings searchers played in hopes of attracting an ivory-bill. A year after Cornell’s announcement, ornithologist Jerome Jackson dismissed Cornell’s findings as “faith-based ornithology.”
Natural resurrection
TO THEOLOGIAN PAUL TILLICH, resurrection did not refer to Christ’s return from the tomb or any future event in which believers would be raised from the dead. Instead, he said in a 1955 speech, “Resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old.” Resurrection was the ongoing “power of the New Being” to transform death into life in the present moment. “Resurrection happens now,” Tillich wrote, “or it does not happen at all.”
Tillich’s ideas might have sounded new to some listeners, and he is still occasionally declared a heretic. But his line of thinking, by many accounts, predated the literal interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection. In the early years after Christ’s death, some of Christ’s followers believed that spirit and matter were irreconcilably separate entities and that Christ only seemed to have a physical body but was in fact a purely spiritual being. These beliefs — called docetic from the Greek word for “to seem” — were absorbed into the larger, so-called Gnostic movement, and surfaced in texts written in the second and third centuries following Christ’s death.
Christ’s death and resurrection as physical events were most famously defended in the second century by Tertullian and Irenaeus, two prominent figures in early Christianity, who saw God’s power to resurrect the dead mirrored and foretold by God’s creation of the universe. Tertullian wrote that all of creation “has an instinct for renewal.” Irenaeus argued that “God’s desire is always to bring things to, or back to, life.”
This is the logic of resurrection that I can’t quite shake, the internal, embodied rhythms of the earth’s predictable cycles lulling me into believing there will always be more: That what we lose will come back to us, in whatever new forms.
The elegiac tone with which we discuss the natural world — in this era of mass extinction, biodiversity loss, and increasingly frequent and extreme natural disasters — has driven resurrection to the front of my mind. It seems possible that our concepts of conservation and preservation — of “saving” the world from the catastrophes it faces and “restoring” the places we’ve lost — rely in part on the narrative of resurrection, of bringing a dead thing back to life, and with it, saving ourselves.
A symbol of what’s lost
THE CONTROVERSY OVER the ivory-bill has often boiled down to an argument between skeptics and believers. Though the skeptics have more ground to stand on, the believers seem way more fun. In the 2009 documentary, Ghost Bird, the skeptics in sterile labs pontificate over collections of taxidermied birds, while the believers head into the swamp, their eyes trained on the trees.
For The Grail Bird, Gallagher interviewed experts with “the big question”: Do they believe there are any ivory-bills left in the world? In Gallagher’s tautology, people who doubt the ivory-bill’s existence are predisposed to dismiss reported sightings, while belief that the birds still live becomes evidence for the bird’s survival. In Gallagher’s “big question,” I am reminded of the Bible’s definition of faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).
In March 2021, Gallagher and Harrison appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, canoeing slowly between tupelo and cypress trees, affixing ivory-bill decoys to tree trunks. Harrison talked about how vulnerable bottomland habitats could be protected if they could finally offer proof of living ivory-bills. The ivory-bill, he said, is “really a symbol of what’s been lost.”
Six months later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended that 23 species, including the ivory-billed woodpecker, be removed from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act and declared extinct. After a public comment period, the USFWS issued a news release saying, “the Service will continue to analyze and review the information before deciding whether to delist the ivory-billed woodpecker.”
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How the story changes for you
ARGUMENTS OVER THE resurrection are often presented in discrete categories: One believes or one doesn’t; the resurrection was either literal or it was symbolic. There should be a third option outside the bounds of these tight frames. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner presents a model for scriptural interpretation that moves beyond tidy binaries. With scripture, Kushner writes, “We are in possession not of the dream itself, but only of its next-morning memory. Once a dream is told, it becomes something else.”
In my father’s final months as a pastor, he told me about an argument with a friend about the historical accuracy of the Bible: “When it comes to the literal resurrection,” my father said, “I’m still waffling on that. I go back and forth on whether Christ was literally resurrected.”
I was surprised that after 42 years in the pulpit my father had not decided. This comment revealed that, even for my father, there need not be an arrival at some perfect and unchanging belief. Instead, there might be only moments of rearticulation, steps taken forward and back.
Perhaps the real question is how the story changes for you, whether the resurrection was a literal, historic event or something more ambiguous; whether the resurrection refers to a singular miracle, or a story that changed and evolved over time. How does the meaning change, if Christ’s resurrection foretells believers’ physical resurrection from the dead, or if this story emphasizes the necessity of transformation itself — not just of the individual, but of the collective? What changes for you, to believe that the ivory-bill is gone forever, or could be found somewhere, still?
Wetland resurrection
PERHAPS I’VE FELT uneasy with the language of resurrection because insisting on the resurrection of desecrated places and extinct species often comes from a desire to erase the past and all the harm we’ve done. Forests can come back. But it takes a long time. Longer than a few days in a cold stone tomb. Longer than the length of our lives. And so perhaps it feels impossible, a kind of magical thinking built on denial and guilt. But then I visited an Arkansas farmer named Craig Shackelford. Twenty years ago, he signed up for the Wetland Reserve Program to convert his thousand-acre rice farm into shady forests and a fully inhabited wetland.
The wetland swept across the horizon in a riot of preening feathers and flapping wings. Above us, ibises, egrets, and herons were making their final descent, sometimes flying just a few feet over our heads, so close we could hear their wings droning, a vibrating, rhythmic hum.
Most striking were the roseate spoonbills. Looking through binoculars, I could barely make out their bright red eyes, the blue cast of their oblong bills and bald heads. In flight, their wings and tail feathers flashed magenta and neon pink. They show up every year around Easter and leave by Labor Day.
Wetlands like this, where the ivory-bill once lived, offer some of the world’s best protection against the effects of climate change. The more these habitats are destroyed, the more carbon is released in the atmosphere, and the more species we lose to extinction. This feedback loop works in reverse: The more wetlands are protected and allowed to expand, the more carbon can be captured, the more biodiversity can be nurtured.
Like the ivory-bill, the roseate spoonbill was nearly extinct by the mid-20th century. But once roseate spoonbills were placed under federal protection, their populations rebounded. The effects of climate change have pushed the birds to find nesting grounds much farther north than their coastal habitats. Even though this resurrected wetland didn’t result in the resurrection of the ivory-bill, the transformation from death to life was evident.
In the Book of Ezekiel, God leads the prophet to a valley filled with bones and asks him whether the bones might live again. Ezekiel answered, “only you know that.” But God told Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones, to command them to come to life. As Ezekiel spoke, the bones began to rattle, coming together, “bone to bone.” Sinews formed between the bones, and flesh covered them, and finally breath came into these bodies, and they lived again. Watching crowds of birds wading through the water, their long, curved bills skimming the matte green surface, I thought about God asking Ezekiel whether dry bones can live again, and Ezekiel’s answer: Only God knows.
This article is adapted from World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After (Hub City Press, May 2025; used with permission).
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