birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers' fruit and
had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies' hat. In 1914, the last surviving members
of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity.
A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman's warbler. Always rare, it was
said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in
1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a
Bachman's warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!),
and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman's warbler. But there are almost certainly
others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three
species of bird--the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue
Mountain warbler--that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of
Townsend's bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington.
Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50
percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and
other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to
fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen
population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.
Late in the afternoon, I stepped from the trees onto what appeared to be a disused
logging road. In the center of the road stood an older guy with a pack and a curiously
bewildered look, as if he had just woken from a trance and found himself unaccountably
in this place. He had, I noticed, a haze of blackflies of his own.
"Which way's the trail go, do you suppose?" he asked me. It was an odd question
because the trail clearly and obviously continued on the other side. There was a three-
foot gap in the trees directly opposite and, in case there was any possible doubt, a white
blaze painted on a stout oak.
I swatted the air before my face for the twelve thousandth time that day and nodded
at the opening. "Just there, I'd say."
"Oh, yes," he answered. "Of course."
We set off into the woods together and chatted a little about where we had come from
that day, where we were headed, and so on. He was a thru-hiker--the first I had seen this
far north--and like me was making for Dalton. He had an odd, puzzled look all the time
and regarded the trees in a peculiar way, running his gaze slowly up and down their
lengths over and over again, as if he had never seen anything like them before.
"So what's your name?" I asked him.
"Well, they call me Chicken John."
"Chicken John!" Chicken John was famous. I was quite excited. Some people on the
trail take on an almost mythic status because of their idiosyncrasies. Early in the trip Katz
and I kept hearing about a kid who had equipment so high-tech that no one had ever
seen anything like it. One of his possessions was a self-erecting tent. Apparently, he
would carefully open a stuff sack and it would fly out, like joke snakes from a can. He also
had a satellite navigation system, and goodness knows what else. The trouble was that
his pack weighed about ninety-five pounds. He dropped out before he got to Virginia, so
we never did see him. Woodrow Murphy, the walking fat man, had achieved this sort of
fame the year before. Mary Ellen would doubtless have attracted a measure of it if she
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
#1