Iowa Birders Visit the Home of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Nature Conservancy shares conservation success with area birders

Des Moines, Iowa—January 31, 2006 What can an Iowan learn from a large swamp in central Arkansas?

The Nature Conservancy of Iowa thinks there is plenty of “good science and community work” in the Big Woods of Arkansas to bring back and apply in Iowa. The Big Woods is home to the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was rediscovered in February 2004, and it’s the place of one of the most notable conservation success stories in the past 100 years.

Two Nature Conservancy board members and avid bird enthusiasts from Iowa, Don Brown of Des Moines and Lee Schoenewe of Spencer, visited the Big Woods of Arkansas this week. They were the first Iowans to visit the area where the ivory-bill was rediscovered in February 2004. On the trip, Brown, Schoenewe and Leslee Spraggins, Iowa state director for the Conservancy, traveled to the area where the ivory-bill was last seen, met with members of the search party and toured some of the 550,000-acre Big Woods.

Canoers in the Big Woods of Arkansas

Arkansas' Big Woods

Birder in Arkansas' Big Woods

“We saw firsthand the results of a collective effort of local residents, private organizations and government agencies to conserve a magnificent habitat while serving the needs of the community and hunters. As birders, we also reap the benefits of one of the largest blocks of bottomland hardwood forest in North America, having seen more than 75 species in our two-day visit,” said Brown.

“The ivory-bill survives because of the decades of habitat protection efforts in Arkansas by hunters and anglers, private landowners, other private organizations and state and federal land management agencies,” said Spraggins, “We can apply many of the lessons learned to our own habitats and species here in Iowa.”

Spraggins should know about laying the groundwork for successful habitat conservation – she was the Big Woods project manager in Arkansas for seven years, prior to the re-discovery of the ivory-bill. Spraggins came to Iowa to serve as state director in 2001.

“Our goal in the Big Woods was to create a large-scale conservation area by working with partners, including private landowners, to conserve, restore, expand, connect and sustainably use the natural resources of the Big Woods,” said Spraggins. “We are using the same approach in Iowa.”

“We have our own indicator bird here in Iowa – ours is the greater prairie chicken,” said Brown. “The bird’s ability to survive indicates the health of the habitat.” Between 1850 and 1950, the prairie chicken went from abundant in Iowa to gone. On a 70,000-acre prairie restoration project that straddles the Missouri-Iowa border, the Conservancy and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) have successfully returned the prairie chicken to its natural habitat.

“Another example of an indicator species is at Cayler Prairie in the Little Sioux Valley. We have the last documented sighting 10-15 years ago of the Dakota skipper, an elusive butterfly,” said Schoenewe. With the Iowa DNR, the Conservancy is working to conserve, restore, expand and connect 15,000 acres of prairie throughout the Little Sioux Valley. “Perhaps we will see the Dakota skipper, like the ivory-bill, go from extinct to re-discovered,” Schoenewe added.

In the Driftless area of northeast Iowa, a snail once-thought extinct was rediscovered in the 1980s. The Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have worked to protect 22 of the 37 algific talus slopes that the Iowa Pleistocene snail calls home. This ice-age snail has already gone from extinct to federally endangered. Could it be removed from the endangered species list by simply conserving its unique habitat?

“We have many examples throughout Iowa of animal and plant species dependent on large-scale landscapes. These landscapes can continue to sustain these various species through better land-use practices that can be economically viable to the landowner and community,” said Spraggins. “We want to see both sides win.”

The ivory-bill search was re-launched in December with 22 full-time field staff for the entire six months of the search season. Highly qualified volunteers, 112 of them, will be sent into the field in groups of 14 for two weeks at a time. Multiple methods are being used to search for the bird. Human observation is the bedrock, and the searchers are often on foot or in a canoe, walking transects with GPS units, or sitting in blinds. They look for the bird and for environmental clues that an ivory-bill may be in the area, cavities and bark scaling.