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Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Julie Zickefoose - Nature artist and writer. You can think about heat like this from the comfort of an air-conditioned home or nestled in the remove of winter. But until you're out in it, it isn't real. This is the kind of heat that makes you sprint for your car and turn on the blowers to full, gasping and soaked through to the skin. Admittedly, I'm a tenderfoot; at home in Ohio, we'll have a week or two of high 90s and be done with it. Here, in deepest backwoods Florida, I am amazed to see people going about their business, even being cheery, occasionally pulling out a handkerchief to wipe their brows, but otherwise hardly acknowledging what to me is a crushing, all-defeating overlord. Add to that the hoards of mosquitoes, that have evolved with the image of a minivan in their tiny brains, knowing instinctively that within lies exposed human flesh. They ping and bing off the windows, probing with their fine needles around the weatherstripping, waiting for the window to roll down so they can flood in. I am here to watch birds in the pine-ringed cypress swamps, and so I spray myself one last time with repellent, roll down my sleeves, button up my collar, and launch myself once again into the barrage. The scope is heavy, and it cuts into my shoulder as I alternately walk and wade to the place where, by chance, I heard something yesterday, something I had never heard before.

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