[TN-Bird] An editorial on the ivory billed find

From: Dthomp2669@xxxxxxx
To: Dthomp2669@xxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 3 May 2005 08:52:51 EDT
It occurred to me that birders might wish to read this editorial from the NY 
TIMES on the ivory billed woodpecker.
Dee Thompson
Nashville, TN

 
April 30, 2005EDITORIAL 

The Lord God Bird

    
ere are the reasons to be impressed by the ivory-billed woodpecker, which has 
emerged like a feathered ghost from the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas more 
than a half-century after its presumed extinction.

It's huge and beautiful. "A whacking big bird," Roger Tory Peterson wrote, 
nearly two feet long with a three-foot wingspan, black and white with a streak 
of red on the male's pterodactyl crest and a fearsome glint in its yellow eyes. 
To see an ivory-bill left people thunderstruck; their exclamations inspired 
its nickname: the Lord God bird. 

It's alive. The word miracle is overused, but what else explains the survival 
in the 21st century of an animal considered lost to history so long ago? The 
ivory-bill was mourned as a mythologized victim of intense predation and 
habitat loss, of hunters and collectors, of the leveling of millions of acres 
of 
Southern forests into pulp and sawdust. Somehow it has endured.

It is an environmental wonder worker. The ivory-bill has had an awesome hold 
on people's imaginations, to the immense benefit of the environment. In the 
1970's, after an Audubon official reported merely hearing the bird in a South 
Carolina swamp, the state spared 10,000 acres from clear-cutting. More 
recently, 
an unconfirmed sighting led to a logging moratorium in Louisiana. The 
ivory-bill's return is especially sweet to conservationists in Arkansas, where 
it 
could help protect the rivers and swamps in the Big Woods, a poor but lush part 
of Arkansas that one local environmentalist calls "our Everglades, our 
Yellowstone." 

The struggle to preserve the natural environment is one of crushed hopes and 
excruciating wistfulness. But not always. The ivory-billed woodpecker is a 
living monument to the stubbornness of all creatures that refuse to be erased, 
despite all our blundering and destructive habits. Its odd nickname is a 
fitting 
tribute: not "Wow," "Geez" or "Check it out," but "Lord God," two words that 
capture the moment when the eyes widen, the muscles go slack and the mind 
reels at the wondrous things with which we share the world. 



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[TN-Bird] An editorial on the ivory billed find

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