Ivory-billed Woodpecker at nest, taken by Dr. James Tanner, at the Singer Tract in 1935. Photo: Science History Images/Alamy. See National Audubon’s article for more info and photos.
Emily Dickinson's famous line—"Hope is the thing with feathers"—finds its way into many bird essays. But the news about the official extinction of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (and other species) reminds us that despair also can cloak itself in feathers.
As an Arkansan, the news hit me hard. The last purported sighting of the ivory-billed came in the White River National Wildlife Refuge of southeast Arkansas and spurred tremendous activity and optimism. The US Fish and Wildlife Service began buying more acreage for habitat for the bird and field biologists and others flocked to the area to authenticate the find and hopefully locate more birds. My brother gave me one of my all time favorite Christmas presents, a print of the bird flying through the flooded timber of the White River bottoms.
White River National Wildlife Refuge cypress trees. Photo by Ray Paterra / USFWS
For years I hunted ducks at one of the edges of the refuge and could easily believe that the woodpeckers had gone undetected for years. It's a sprawling place with 100s of thousands of acres with seasonal flooding in the fall and winter and a tough landscape to negotiate at any time. Vast areas were probably rarely visited by humans, much less those trained to recognize the bird's calls and physical characteristics. The ornithologists who searched for the bird describe those difficulties vividly, in particular the abundance of water moccasins in the warmer months. That snake is my choice for the most formidable of the South's several pit vipers.
For all that, the refuge is stunningly beautiful, with big timber in places that survive the floods, and an astonishing array of animals. Mallards seek out flooded oaks and, to all my birding friends who enjoy waterfowl, you have not seen mallards at their most spectacular until you've seen them twisting, banking, and fluttering through mature oak trees to land in the surrounding waters.
Experienced biologist made the initial find and had a short video. Experts examined it for months in every bit of detail and many, but not all, thought the bird was the ivory-billed.
Ivory-billed Woodpecker painting by John James Audubon. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
What happened? Maybe the discoverers were mistaken. I've always wondered if, as the ivory-billed dwindled, some of them produced hybrids with Pileated Woodpeckers, very common where the ivory-billed lived. Those, if they ever existed, would have had some of the physical traits of both parents. The saddest possibility: they saw the last Ivory-billed Woodpecker, an old, old bird who died soon thereafter.
Some ornithologists are not giving up. Reports and rumors persist of the bird holding on in some of Cuba'a wildest and well protected areas. I hope they're true.
Why the extinction? Reading about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, especially in light of its official extinction, is incredibly depressing. Even when some remnant populations were discovered early in the last century, that habitat was destroyed via rapacious timbering. This was also a deplorable chapter in professional ornithology. Many of those scientists, who knew fully well how rare the bird was, shot the ones they found for museum specimens. Now, of course, that seems reprehensible, but perhaps today's field biologists should take some time to examine their own practices. Maybe some of what seems routine and justified is doing more harm than we might think.
Where's the hope? The other day I was on the screened in porch when I noticed a nemesis—a large and especially ugly fly had found its way into the porch. I was advancing with a rolled up newspaper, which was going to end badly with a hole in the screen and a fly unscathed. Meanwhile the fly had landed on the floor. Suddenly it began struggling and could not get off the floor. It had brushed the slightest wisp of a spider's filament and could not break free. Within a couple of seconds, a tiny gray, almost translucent spider appeared. The burly fly was four or five times the size of the spider. The spider began wrapping it in more filaments. When I brought Sally to witness this, a span of no more than two or three minutes, the fly was totally wrapped. The spider, with apologies to Gary Larson and one of his great cartoons, was going to eat like a king.
So this fable of the Big Fly and the Tiny Spider (it really, really did happen) for me means that we conservationists and environmentalists face huge problems: the changed climate. loss of habitat, pesticides, too many nitwit politicians and more. But if we keep working and nimbly seize every opportunity we have we can take the Big Flies on. For Madison Audubon that means we beat the lawsuit filed by the conservation law firm and big developers to overturn the local protection we won for birds (read more). We seize every reasonable opportunity to expand our sanctuaries and provide more habitat. We work with other local and regional conservation organizations to those same ends. We make sure that conservation and essential programs like Stewardship are part of every Wisconsin political campaign.
Taking care of a monarch. Photo by Michael Anderson
We can't have a Madison Audubon blogger 20 years from now lamenting the extinction of the monarch butterfly or any of our endangered, threatened, or rare species. Let's do whatever we can, whenever we can to make sure that doesn't happen.
Written by Topf Wells, Madison Audubon board member and advocacy committee chair
