In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

HAD I SEEN A FEMALE cone-billed tanager? Perhaps, but I later learned something that casts a fair bit of doubt on it. Like any birder, I'd pored over the field guides for months before going to Brazil, and had memorized most of the common species illustrated in the color plates. But I'd fallen into the trap of mostly looking at the pictures and paying scant attention to the text. When I later sat down with Bob Ridgely's Birds of South America, I read something I'd overlooked until then, hidden in the account of the black-faced tanager, one of the species that made up the flock that day: "Sexes alike, but immature entirely different (and may not even be recognized as the same species): olive above, more yellowish on the head an

I was recording the song of a wren when Doug spun around, pointing, and said, "A black bird just flew across he road!" My adrenaline surged.

d with yellow eye-ring; paler yellowish-olive below."

That's a rough description of what I saw, but it's not precisely the same; for instance, my tanager was brighter green than this description indicates, nor did I see a yellow eye ring—the sort of basic field mark birders usually notice quickly. But it seems far more likely that my greenish mystery bird was a young black-faced tanager traveling with its parents, rather than a never-before-seen cone-billed female.

But our failure to find the tanager did not diminish our belief that the bird was still out there somewhere—if anything, it reinforced it, by the simple experience of showing us how huge the bird's potential world is. We had looked hard for the tanager, but when we plotted our route on the map, it was only a squiggle in an immensity of space. Even within the areas we had visited, there are many places where few but the Indians have gone, valleys and drainages that have changed not at all with the coming of the Europeans. Though the world is shrinking daily, much of it is still unknown; the blank spots are disappearing beneath the unblinking eyes of satellites and the probing fingers of chainsaws, bulldozers, and the farmer's hoe, but great swaths of the planet remain a mystery to polite society, fit habitat for myths and monsters, a place where dreams can live. One of those dreams is six inches long and has a white spot on each wing.

Who cares if the cone-billed tanager is alive, or if it, like tens of billions of organisms since life first arose, is now extinct? What does one tanager, more or less, matter when weighed against more than 9,000 living species of birds? You're asking the wrong person. Leaving aside the fundamental worth of every species, representing the unique harvest of nearly four billion years of natural selection—forgetting the value of a salvaged treasure in the face of global extinction—Vellard's small black bird has come to matter a very great deal to me, out of all proportion to its size and ecological role, or even its place in a 60-year-old ornithological mystery. Obsession doesn't need reason or rationale, it simply requires an object of desire, the less attainable the better. I lie awake some nights, thinking back to the hot breeze on the chapada, hawks wheeling overhead and tinamous hooting mournfully in the thickets. I am certain the tanager is still there, as I am certain I am the one who can find it. I'm going back to Mato Grosso to look for that bird again. Soon.

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