For me, a postscript to the Sonny Boy story came on Friday, July 3, 2009. Books such as Ghost Birds are assembled from thousands of shards and pieces, like an explosion in reverse. I had gotten a phone call from Nancy Tanner two days earlier. She had located an envelope of old ivory-bill prints and negatives she did not know she still had in her home. Jim had donated almost all of the original material to Cornell or the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge—those items are now archived at LSU—in the late 1980s.
Nancy and I agreed to one of our customary lunches, which she prepared for me. With a Wimbledon semifinal match on in the background (American Andy Roddick beat Britain’s own Andy Murray, 6-4, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6), we discussed a wide range of topics. (If there’s anything Nancy loves more than discussing a wide range of topics, it’s tennis.) After our lunch, we cleared the dining-room table and I began to sort through the material. I soon came across the first precious slice of history, one of the original negatives of J.J. Kuhn and the young ivory-bill, and then another and another. But the thing is, they were images I had never seen!
My heart began to pound. The exact whereabouts of the original negatives had been a mystery.
“Goodness, Nancy do you know what these are?”
By the time I worked my way through the stack of material, we learned that Jim had actually taken at least fourteen photos that day. Yes, fourteen! I said to Nancy, “Does anyone in the world know this?” And at that moment, we both realized that perhaps we were the only two people who did.
On his 24th birthday: March 6, 1938, after he calmed his jitters and “buck fever,” Jim had been able to reel off over a dozen black-and-white photos, some of the most memorable photographs in the annuals of natural history; a series of indelible images that show the frenzied nestling close up, outside the safety of its nest hole. An excited young male Campephilus principalis that in a matter of minutes had climbed all over woodsmen Kuhn, like a hyper cat on a scratching post. Be still my beating heart!
(At this point Jim had not given the bird the nickname Sonny Boy because it was too early to be sure of its gender.)
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