|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
View the first ivory-billed woodpecker postcard >> |
||||||||||||||||||
|
| |
About Phillip HooseA graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences, Hoose has been a staff member of The Nature Conservancy since 1977. Through the American Birding Association, he co-founded the Cuba Initiative, a fund to provide materials such as binoculars and field guides and art supplies to bird educators in Cuba. A songwriter and performing musician, Phillip Hoose is a founding member of the Children's Music Network. He lives in Portland, Maine. |
By Phillip Hoose
Senior Conservation Planner, The Nature Conservancy;
Author of The Race To Save the Lord God Bird
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
NEW: Read Phillip Hoose's third postcard and fourth postcard from the Big Woods of Arkansas and see photos of the ivory-billed woodpecker cheeseburger!
Grateful for Another Chance
Like the rest of the world, I was stunned and elated by the news that the ivory-billed woodpecker has been among us all along.
As the author of The Race To Save the Lord God Bird, I have been asked the same question again and again – is this the last ivory-bill or is it part of a breeding population? Wouldn't it be tragic, interviewers ask, if this were the last individual of a doomed species?
Well, it would, but the ivory-bill has been here before. In 1944, our awareness of The Lord God Bird, as it was often called, was reduced to one female who returned to a single ash tree each night for a few weeks to roost. When the tree was blown down in a windstorm the entire species was presumed to have toppled with it.
However, a second chance to save the ivory-bill arose when ornithologists reclassified the Cuban ivory-bill, downgrading it from a separate species to status as a Cuban "population" which had somehow become separated their American cousins.
But being back on the taxonomic map didn't make the ivory-bill any easier to find. Carpintero real, as Cubans call it, offered only decades-apart sightings until the spring of 1986 when several members of a scientific discovery team got fleeting looks at ivory-bills, glimpses reminiscent of those recently achieved in Arkansas.
Then, as now, the Cuban sightings led to popular celebration. There was extensive coverage in People, The New York Times and in Natural History, which joyfully proclaimed, "The Ivory-bill Still Lives." One of the Cuban searchers told me word spread so rapidly that their discovery was known even by their hotel maids when they got back to Havana. Preparations were made to find more birds and to encourage a breeding population.
And then, characteristically, the avian world's most accomplished fugitive vanished from sight. The ivory-bill has not been credibly reported in Cuba since 1987.
To me, it is important to consider what conservation actions were taken in each of these three great episodes. In 1944 authorities allowed the Singer Tract – the last big virgin scrap of a swamp forest that once flanked the Mississippi River from Memphis to the Gulf – to be destroyed. Even if the ivory-bill had never been seen there again, saving the Singer Tract would have been a gift to the world.
Four decades later, Cuban authorities responded swiftly to reports of ivory-bill sightings. They reserved from commercial exploitation hundreds of thousands of acres by establishing Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, one of the most biologically diverse tropical island sites on earth.
With this recent sighting in Arkansas, conservationists have responded vigorously to this once in a lifetime chance. A Nature Conservancy-led partnership is working to assemble a vast forest swamp which will at least give the species a place to recover, if breeding stock remains.
Sometimes, before I drop off to sleep at night, I try to imagine what it would be like to be that male ivory-bill in Arkansas. In the darkness, I can hear the electric chatter of tree frogs and feel the warm southern wind sift through curtains of Spanish moss.
And I wonder if an ivory-bill will ever again cross the path of a camera.
Even if we never see it again, I'm grateful that this familiar ghost has appeared once more to focus the world's attention on the global crisis in endangered species. We have an urgent need to save the habitat that species like the ivory-bill depend upon. The current resurrection of the Lord God Bird offers us one more good chance to roll up our sleeves and work to safeguard the creatures with whom we share the earth.
NEXT: Phillip Hoose travels to the Big Woods of Arkansas in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
For more information about the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Big Woods of Arkansas:
- Found: The Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Learn about the timeline of the search for the ivory-bill, The Nature Conservancy's conservation efforts in the Big Woods of Arkansas, meet the search team, and more! - Chat: Phillip Hoose Chats About the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Phillip Hoose, author of The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, discusses the recent rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. - Online Excerpt: The Race to Save the Lord God Bird
Read a three-page excerpt of Phillip Hoose's award-winning book about the ivory-billed woodpecker, The Race to Save the Lord God Bird. - How You Can Help: Donate Online
Support our efforts to conserve the critical habitat of the Big Woods for the ivory-billed woodpecker and other species. - News Room: Ivory-billed Woodpecker News
See ivory-billed woodpecker photos, maps of the habitat of the ivory-bill, and other news and information about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
