8 Ty Hak .ASUrDVUeBiON BUT Devise 
area — no doubt about it — all the trees flashed the identification signal. 
Towering sweet gums, beech, cypress, water oak, yellow poplar, red maple 
— why were they here unless they thrived in the water which swelled 
against their exposed roots and trunks each spring? Down at our eye level 
was the graceful American holly growing as a tree; sweet bay, the lowland 
member of the magnolia family; and May haw, erect and sturdy, showing 
no ill effects from living under four feet of water until May. These were 
truly moisture-loving trees! The question popped into mind — can they 
adapt themselves to life in drier places as well? Or do other species sup- 
plant them on higher land? I soon uncovered the answer. 
A trail away from the river led us through a forest increasingly more 
dense with shrubs and new varieties of trees. Shortly we stopped in an 
apparently typical spot. No longer were cypress or water oak or sweet bay 
the ruling trees. Sweet gum was still abundant, a few red maples were 
there, but the other species were new: four types of oaks, basket oak, red 
oak, post oak, and white oak, and papaw and the tall straight trunks of 
loblolly pine. Holly grew as a shrub, no longer attaining tree rank. There 
was less moisture here and the whole forest knew it. 
A virgin forest of loblolly pine formed the final link in the chain farther 
upland, with scattered red oaks and sweet gum persisting. It didn’t take a 
book to tell us now which of these trees can live only in or near water, which 
can live only away from it, and that some, like sweet gum and red oak, 
apparently adapt to its presence or absence successfully. 
In the deep forest solitudes of Florida and Louisiana roam a dozen 
scattered pairs of the biggest, handsomest and rarest American woodpecker, 
the ivorybill. Once common in parts of the south, this bird has not been 
able to adapt its food habits to man’s advancing civilization and has been 
driven rapidly and surely into the few pristine forests still standing. Today 
it is numbered among the species nearly extinct; the latest estimate is that 
there are around two dozen birds left in existence. At least half of these 
probably inhabit the Singer Tract in northern Louisiana. 
I saw the Tract last summer and spent one hour in its atmosphere of 
primitive wonder. Even a glimpse of an ivorybill was far too much to hope 
for in so short a time, but not a minute sped by without concentrated look- 
ing and listening for that large black bird with the glossy ivory bill, flaming 
red crest, and white wing patches. I wandered around John’s Bayou where 
three pair of ivorybills had been seen that spring and experienced the 
exhiliarant tenseness that surges through one’s whole being in a setting of 
such sacred rarity. Once I heard the nasal “yank” of a nuthatch and 
feverishly traced it down to be certain that it was not the closely resembling 
call of the ivorybill. It was not. My eyes searched constantly for the huge 
piles of bark and slabs of wood at the base of a diseased tree, which are 
telltale evidence of the powerful bird’s quest for insect larvae. Under the 
tall crowns of great cypress, ash, pecan and magnolia I pushed my way, 
past streams of turgid water, through palmetto, cane, poison ivy and the 
inch-long thorns of cat-briar smilax, until my hour was up. It was a 
fascinating, though vain, search in one of the few spots left in this country 
where wilderness reigns supreme — or did, at least, until logging began in 
