The Lord God Bird

The Lord God Bird is a 2012 novel by Canadian writer and actor Tom Gallant, published by Quantuck Lane Press of New York. The book is told from the perspective of both an anonymous widower and the ivory-billed woodpecker that he finds continuing to live in the Big Woods of Arkansas.

Only ever referred to as “the man,” the main human character is “neither young nor old. He was fit and able and lived as his father had, taking his living from the riches he found in the woods and the farm he worked on the ancient land” of the Big Woods in Arkansas. One evening, he hears a knocking sound in the woods, recognizing it from his younger days as the sound of an ivory-billed woodpecker. The woodpecker has recently flown from Florida with its mate, remembering the Big Woods from an earlier time.

The man tells a neighbor about his discovery. Word soon spreads, and two men, Ron and Steve, from the ornithology lab at Cornell University show up at the man’s house. He takes them in his grandfather’s canoe out into the woods, where they hear the distinctive two raps of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and later they take a blurry photograph of a bird in flight. This is not enough for the lab to verify the sighting, and Steve returns with some volunteer birdwatchers. Meanwhile, as the pair of birds suffer a barren set of eggs, and are dismayed at the disappearance of so many other animals from their youth, businesses in the town start using the ivory-billed woodpecker in advertisements to gin up more patrons. The crew manages to capture four seconds of footage of the bird from a remote camera and returns to New York.

Near the end of the novel, when the man is out in the woods again, one of the ivory-billed woodpeckers lands on the man’s canoe, made by his grandfather, and is able to share some inherited memories with the man. He is given to understand that, even if the publicity might contribute to the preservation of the Big Woods, the bird does not want to be found, and the man promises to keep the secret. The book ends with the mating pair having produced three new eggs.

The Lord God Bird uses the announcement of the ivory-billed woodpecker’s apparent survival to frame a character study of both a bird long thought extinct and an old man whose way of life, with its close ties to the land on which he lives, is also on the verge of extinction in the modern world. Writing for the Bird Watcher’s Digest, reviewer John E. Riutta described the novel as “a delightful tale written in a superbly spare and grounded style” that warrants comparison to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row or John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War.

For additional information:
Gallant, Tom. The Lord God Bird. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2012.

Riutta, John E. “The Lord God Bird.” Bird Watcher’s Digest, July/August 2012. Online at https://www.wellreadnaturalist.com/2012/10/the-lord-god-bird/ (accessed October 15, 2026).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas