In Search of the Phantom Tanager

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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In Search of the Phantom Tanager
A bird obsessive chases a maddening truth: the more elusive the prize, the more tantalizing the hunt

By Scott Weidensaul


	Illustration by Deborah Barrett

THERE WAS NOTHING SUBTLE about the smell. When the breeze shifted, pushing the damp morning air into our faces, the stench walloped us like a physical blow. "Whew, man," said Doug Wechsler, our expedition photographer. "Smells like something died."

"Lots of somethings," I said, trying to breathe through my mouth.

We were walking along a narrow, packed-dirt road in the hinterlands of Mato Grosso, in western Brazil, less than a hundred miles from the Bolivian border. On either side of us, low forest covered the rolling hills, with a wide band of tall grass fringing the road for a hundred yards or so. Just ahead, several yellow-headed vultures formed a mourning party, and as we got closer, they flapped languorously into the air.

Now we could hear the buzz of flies, and realized the smell was coming from a roadside dump full of cow hides, entrails, heads, and partial skeletons, apparently the offal of a butchering operation at one of the ranches we'd passed a few miles back. Unfortunately, the trail we needed to take was almost buried by the stinking heap.

A few minutes later, we reached the edge of the woods upwind of the dump and gasped clean air. Fabiano Olivera, a 21-year-old biology student from the university in Cuiabá, paused and nudged a white object with his foot—the shoulder blade of a cow, one of hundreds of bleached bones lying in great piles. We'd hired Fabiano, a slim young man with a long brown ponytail, to be a driver and guide, a job he often takes between semesters, but he was coming to realize we were not his typical ecotourists. The three of us were at the start of an expedition that would, over the course of several weeks, carry us across more than a thousand miles of bad road, forest, highland savanna, degraded farming land, and lush river valleys, searching for an enigmatic bird that had been seen only once, more than 60 years ago, in a place no one today can pinpoint. There were times when I felt it might make more sense to stand in the dark with a burlap sack, yelling, "Here, snipe, snipe, snipe!" But that came later.

We were looking for a songbird, one of the most famous lost species of South America. On August 25, 1938, a Frenchman named Dr. A. Vellard traveled through Mato Grosso and, like many amateur naturalists in those days, he gathered a small collection of birds typical of the region, shooting and stuffing a few dozen species he encountered. Later he showed his skins to the prominent French ornithologist Jacques Berlioz, who realized that one of them—somewhat larger than a sparrow, glossy black with a white belly and a small patch of white on each wing like the corner of a handkerchief poking out of a man's dark suit—was a new species. Berlioz named it the cone-billed tanager.

That is all we know about the bird—the physical description of a single male specimen (the female remains unseen and undescribed). No one has reported a cone-billed tanager since 1938, and after more than 60 years, it is considered extinct, perhaps pushed over the edge by massive habitat destruction in large areas of Mato Grosso. But Brazil is a huge country, and Mato Grosso itself is vast—at 352,400 square miles, the region is almost a third larger than the state of Texas. Immense areas of it have rarely if ever been visited by ornithologists, and a six-inch bird would be easy to overlook.

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Scott Weidensaul's forthcoming book, from which this article has been excerpted, is The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species (North Point Press, June 2002)