#j tanner

Afghanistan, February 2011. A young girl waits in line with her mother at a UNHCR  distribution event at Tamir Mill Bus site. UNHCR distributes charcoal and NFI’s to registered IDP’s at one of Kabul’s Informal Settlement Sites in the city centre. 57 families eek out a living in a dilapidated warehouse building owned by the Ministry of Transportation. The site originally served as a storage facility for the national bus company. Tajik and Pashtun families live side by side without any major conflict. Over 70% of the families are returnees from the period 2002-2004 who are unable to achieve sustainable reintegration in their places of origin and subsequently drifted to Kabul City in search of work. There is a nearby school which is accessible to the children but the poor economic circumstances of the many families oblige them to send their children out to work. low levels of literacy, particularly amongst the women, limit their access to employment other than the lowest paid daily wage labor.

I discovered these unbelievable photographs and this fascinating story after my second archive visit. I was moved by this bird specimen. When I researched online I came across the work of James T. Tanner - an American ornithologist who was also moved by this illusive species. He was a doctoral candidate from Cornell University, and in 1937 he was sent to try and track down the Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, hoping to find juveniles, in a Louisa forest called the Singer Tract, as there had been reports of the bird sighted here.

On his trip, he managed to find an Ivory-Bill’s nest, after watching two adults fly into a hole in the tree. After 16 days watching the nest, Tanner noted that the adults would generally forage for the juveniles for approximately 20 minutes at midday. As it had never been done before, Tanner decided to attach an identification band to the juveniles leg while the parents away from the nest.

To cut a long story short, he managed to do this, however during the process, the juvenile fell out of the nest, crash landing in a “tangle of vines”. Terrified of the consequence, Tanner clambered down the tree to retrieve the juvenile. He picked it up and miraculously it hadn’t been injured. It clambered all over him and actually seemed to be pretty happy. After taking these photographs, which are the only existing photographs of living Ivory-Billed nestlings, it was returned to the nest, with an I.D band.

Tanner took these photographs in 1938, however they were not found until 2009, by his widow in an envelope at home!

Since then, numerous sightings have been reported by experienced ornithologists in the Arkansas area, however it has still not been confirmed. So the question of whether this species is now extinct or not, is still unknown.