an ivory-billed woodpecker in 1940s virginia?

"What follows is how this account was relayed to me, preserved in a first-person narrative form as closely as possible to the way the story has been told over the years.

I spent a good deal of time in Virginia Beach in the late 1940s, staying there regularly while helping a friend who was a local entomologist. He had an eye for detail, and so did I. We were often out early after storms because the coastal weather had a way of throwing all sorts of specimens into the open. Heavy winds and pounding rain would push insects, debris, and other oddities right up against the steps and edges of the motel where we stayed. It was not a fine place by any means. It was the kind of place people passed through, the kind of place that always seemed a little grimy, a little temporary, a little off.

But the setting was productive for collecting.

During that period, the two of us began observing a pair of woodpeckers fairly regularly. They were not birds you expected to see casually. Even then, there was something about them that stood apart. Years later, I came to believe, and my friend believed as well, that they may have been ivory-billed woodpeckers. Whether that judgment was correct is for others to argue, but at the time, we both knew we were looking at something extraordinary.

These birds would sometimes perch outside the motel, not far from where we could watch them, but we suspected their actual roost was farther back in the woods. They never seemed fully at home around people. They used the edges, then vanished into deeper cover. That pattern repeated itself enough times that it stayed with me.

Then came the morning after one of the storms.

I was outside salvaging specimens and taking advantage of what the weather had thrown up overnight. At some point, I stopped for a cigar. While I was standing there, another resident came out of the motel and began rummaging through the brush and debris. There was nothing unusual about that at first. People picked through the storm wash all the time. But then she reached into a bush and pulled out a small nest filled with dead baby birds.

What happened next has stayed with me all these years.

She took one of the dead nestlings and put it into her mouth.

There was no hesitation. No sign of confusion. No joke. No expression that I can remember beyond a kind of detached matter-of-factness. It was so unnatural, so abrupt, and so repellent that the moment seemed to split the morning in two. Before that, it had just been another day of fieldwork after rough weather. After that, the entire place felt wrong.

I cannot say with certainty that the birds we had been watching were connected to that scene. I cannot say that the nest she found belonged to them. I cannot even say that what followed was caused by it. But I can say this. After that incident, the woodpeckers were gone.

We did not see them again.

Years later, the matter came up during an ornithological conference that my friend and I were attending. We mentioned the story, including the birds and the bizarre incident that followed, and the reaction was immediate and ugly. Accusations started flying. Some insisted the account had been fabricated. Others went even further and turned the discussion into something hostile and personal, including accusations of racism. At that point, whatever hope there had been of calmly discussing the observation collapsed.

So the story survived in  fragments, passed along in the way strange stories often are. Part natural history account, part local legend, part warning. Over time, I was told it had shown up in local newspaper references and even in a YouTube documentary. I cannot personally verify every retelling, but the core version has remained essentially the same.

Three things endure in my mind.

First, the birds.

Second, the woman with the dead nestlings.

Third, the feeling that whatever happened there was not normal, even by the standards of a rough coastal motel after a storm."