In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

Outside Magazine June 2002

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In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

ONE SODDEN MORNING, we had a teaser, the first time on the trip that our hopes really soared. We'd been making slow progress through the forest, made slower by the ever-fainter trail, which eventually dissolved entirely into featureless scrub, leaving us to backtrack to the edge of the cerrado and try a different route to the river. While we had seen tanagers of half a dozen other species, including one or two rarities, we saw nothing that even hinted at a conebill.

It was sometime after sunrise, and we were in brushy forest, listening to a very different suite of birds than we'd encountered thus far—channel-billed toucans, turkeylike Spix's guans, mustached wrens. Many of the birds, like brown jacamars, were species that Vellard had collected on the same expedition as the cone-billed tanager, giving us hope that we might have stumbled at last on the right mix of habitat and locality.

I was recording the song of a wren when Doug spun around, pointing, and said with quiet but unmistakable excitement, "A black bird just flew across the road!" My adrenaline surged even more a moment later, when I spotted it perched in a solitary tree draped with vines—it was clearly a tanager, almost entirely black, with a spot of white on its wing. I remembered the drawings I'd seen of the conebill, with its fleck of white like a pocket handkerchief.

But then I noticed two things. This bird was black clear to its belly, without the white underparts that a cone-billed tanager would have, and the white on its wing was a thin sliver at the shoulder, not a square spot on the folded flight feathers.

"Where is it? Do you have it?" Doug asked, binoculars poised; then, before I could say anything, he saw the bird move and snapped his glasses to his eyes. "Oh," he said, his voice flat. "That's a white-lined tanager. It's a good bird to find, but..." He didn't need to finish the thought. We'd spent a couple of fruitless weeks in the field, and I was growing a little jaded about our chances. Still, I was content to putter around with my tape recorder and microphone, concentrating on the solid, substantial birds of the chapada instead of chasing after mirages. Doug and I parted company for a few hours, he to photograph some small species of spinetail he'd spotted, me to wander off along the dirt road, stopping here and there to tape new species.

At midmorning, the insect changing-of-the-guard was beginning; with the mosquitoes abating, I rolled up my shirtsleeves against the heat. The first few sweat bees were starting to appear, and I knew that within half an hour we'd be smothered beneath the small, stingless insects thirsty for the moisture on our skin. It was probably time to head back to the van, half a mile up the track, where Fabiano was taking a nap.

I turned to retrace my route, which is the only reason I saw the flock of birds flit across the road, a dozen of them in a ragged line, landing in a fruit tree about 20 feet high. Even that quick glance showed there were several sizes and colors—tropical birds often move in mixed-species flocks like this. Then one more bird flew into the outside edge of the tree—a tanager similar in size and shape to the others, but olive, with a more intense lime-green on the upper parts and upper breast, with a fair bit of streaking. The beak was typical of a tanager, somewhat conical and powerful, light at the base and dark toward the tip.

I will not be melodramatic and say that my heart stopped; the embarrassing truth is that for the first few seconds I couldn't recall where I'd seen the bird before. But then I remembered the field-guide illustrations I'd studied of a female black-and-white tanager, the conebill's closest relative—a bird that was a dead ringer for this one but not found within a thousand miles of us. No one knows what a female cone-billed tanager looks like, but given the similarity of the male to its black-and-white cousin (and the general propensity among female birds of the same genus to resemble one another), what I was seeing is exactly what one would expect a female conebill to look like.

Unfortunately, I had only a few seconds more to stare before the flock broke into flight and disappeared into the cerrado. I dug out my notebook, furiously scribbling down every detail that I could remember, then found myself unsure what to do next. My inclination was to charge off after the flock, but Doug and Fabiano had no idea where I'd gone; besides, if the tanager was the undescribed female of a long-lost species, I'd need all the witnesses I could get.

My indecision lasted only a minute or two, because Doug appeared at the crest of a low hill several hundred yards away, and my frantic gestures brought him at a trot. Fabiano, by another stroke of luck, followed moments later in the van, wondering what was keeping us. We grabbed gear, tapes, and fresh film and slathered ourselves with bug repellent, for the sweat bees were now bearing down in force. We sketched out a hurried plan—the featureless brush of the chapada is an easy place to get lost in, and we didn't have a compass handy. Fabiano would stay with the van, and if we weren't back at a prearranged time, he would start blowing the horn to guide us back to the road.

Heading into the brush, I felt the same keen edge as I have when tracking a buck during deer season—the heightened awareness of my surroundings, the way movement and sound are amplified, the reaching beyond oneself to connect with another animal. There were a few birds in the low trees, mostly sparrows and spinetails, flickers of movement cataloged and ignored. We moved quickly, trying to stay on a straight course, but the undergrowth was so thick—vines, sharp-spined agaves, stunted trees with soot-blackened bark from the last brushfire—that our progress slowed and our path meandered. I tried to keep the sun over my left shoulder, but the clouds, which had shown some breaks earlier in the morning, thickened almost as soon as we entered the cerrado, and I was forced to rely on instinct to stay on course.

All the while, we were battling ferocious clouds of sweat bees, far worse than anything we'd yet experienced. More seemed to rise from the brush with every step. My eyes were red and watering from bees that had crawled under the lids; they didn't sting, but the little bastards bit like tiny ants, and so many of them clogged my nose that I was finding it hard to breathe without choking on them. They packed into my ears, crawled by the dozens under my hat and down to my scalp, and crept with abandon into my clothes so that my skin twitched with them.

There is a reason lost species are lost in the first place. Sometimes the reasons are weighty and formidable, like civil unrest, impenetrable mountains, or bandit warlords who use visitors for target practice. Sometimes they are more prosaic, like bad roads and worse information. And sometimes the reason is sweat bees—too many sweat bees. We finally staggered out of the brush, our eyes streaming and faces speckled with dead, smeared bugs just as Fabiano started honking the horn, never having found the tanager flock.

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