Portrait Collage
The origins of this piece came from my fascination with the sad and mysterious story of the ivory- billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the United States. Naturalist John James Audubon described it as the “Great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe”. Native to the Southern United States, destruction of its habitat and hunting reduced the populations so severely that the last official sighting in the US was in 1944. The bird was commonly found in bottomland hardwood forests and temperate coniferous forests. In William Faulkner‘s novella The Bear, the ivory-billed woodpecker symbolizes the primeval Southern wilderness and the old growth forest of the Mississippi Delta. Although reported sightings and other evidence persist in the 21st-century, the ivory-billed woodpecker is listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct.
“All vanished now from earth – the piteous cry, and all; unless where the Rodney’s swamps are wild enough still, perhaps it is true, the last of the ivory-billed woodpeckers still exist in the world, in this safe spot, inaccessible to man.”
Eudora Welty, Some Notes on River Country (1944).