92 Daniel McKinley 



ivory-billed woodpeckers. The sighting of the latter rare species was 

 finally fully substantiated, although the good news came to naught and 

 the species could not be saved in that area. Sprunt and Chamberlain, in 

 their study of South Carolina birds (1949: 292-293), later summarized the 

 situation and the two authors fell neatly into two positions in the parlia- 

 mentary arena, with Sprunt stoutly arguing for the Ayes. 



In spite of, as will be seen, some equivocation by Robert P. Allen at the 

 time (evident from Audubon Society records), his considered opinion in 

 1949 was that he had not seen parakeets (op. at.: 294). Roger Tory Peter- 

 son also later confidently rejected the whole claim (1948:204, 207). 



The contemporary published record is skimpy. John H. Baker, presi- 

 dent of Sprunt and Allen's parent organization, the National Audubon 

 Society, reported in Bird-Lore (1938) that there were no observations suf- 

 ficiently definite to be considered scientific, although investigations would 

 continue. The official pronouncement of the influential American Or- 

 nithologists' Union Protection Committee (1939) was negative. On the 

 other hand, Samuel Scoville, Jr., an amateur bird-watcher, visited the 

 Santee with some other people in May 1937 and managed to catch sight 

 of a swiftly flying bird that appeared to him to be green in color 

 (1940:564). 



Although convinced that he had seen a parakeet, it was personal con- 

 viction alone for Scoville. Time magazine put it much more forcefully in a 

 sensationalist note in 1941 : "The Carolina parakeet . . . last reported seen 

 in 1904 and long thought extinct, is not. Last week an official of the 

 National Audubon Society confessed that a Charleston ornithologist has 

 been watching parakeets in the Santee River swamps for five years." Ac- 

 tually, not many Audubon officials would have wanted their names as- 

 sociated with such a "confession" by that time. Revisionary hindsight, as 

 has been shown above, even further eroded this ebullient pronounce- 

 ment. 



The ghost of the Santee parakeets, however, has not remained laid. 

 George Laycock, field editor of Audubon (the modern name of Bird-Lore), 

 has blown new life into the old drama of Santee Swamp, and thinks a 

 negative conclusion less than scientifically proved (1969). No uncritical 

 sensationalist, Laycock had just proved that even in zoos where the public 

 record ought to have been straight from the beginning the parakeet lived 

 three years longer than all the official textbooks said. The orthodox had 

 their dates thoroughly mixed up, with misinformation from several 

 sources congealing into the received version. As an example of how in- 

 correct details accrue to an already dubious but popular conclusion, one 

 report even had it that the region where the birds were allegedly sighted 

 "has since been destroyed by a power project" (Greenway 1967:322) — 



