ok. so this is actually old news, though i heard about it when it was new news. i just wanted to think about it a little bit, now that i have the time and emotional capability to do so (since the semester is now complete - yay!)
i've always had a soft spot for birds. not the tame, sad, caged kind that parents give their kids when they're not ready to take on the responsibility of a dog or cat, but the absolutely glorious free, wild, and exhultant kind that grace our skies, swamps, rivers, lakes and oceans. most kids are captivated with the special talent which most birds share, and which humans can never aspire to in any real sense of the word: flight. who hasn't had a flying dream? and as much as i adore the cuddly mammalian varieties of wild animals, there is just something about birds that draws me in.
the first birds i became acquainted with in my youth were the typical songbirds of new england yards - the cute, pert chickadees and titmice, the downy woodpecker, the brilliant cardinal, the amazing upside-down nuthatches, the secretive juncos, the cheeky robins, the blue jays, the mockingbirds, the mourning doves. when i moved to florida to go to college, i discovered a whole new class of birds - the waders and waterbirds. how delightful was the process of becoming acquainted with a whole new set of even more engaging birds! the herons and egrets, the innumerable, maddeningly unidenitfiable shorebirds, the pelicans and gulls. The moorhens and coots, ibis, roseate spoonbills, and wood storks.
In Florida, though bird life was everywhere and there seemed to be no end to it, I became intimately acquainted with a small blue jay who was not having such an easy time of it - the Florida scrub jay. Fewer than 10,000 of these birds are left in the wild, and while they are naturally rare, their fate is by no means certain, as more and more of the scrubland habitat they require is cut down and converted into subdivisions, shopping malls, and various other non-scrub jay friendly land uses. it was then i faced, for the first time, the very real possibility of seeing a bird species go extinct while i was aware of its existence. i knew of extinctions, of course, but those hardly ever happened any longer in this country, what with all our wonderful laws meant to protect our precious biodiversity.
as i learned more about birds, and more about extinctions, i began to collect and read various guides to birds in north america. when i got a job rehabilitating local wildlife, the ability to identify birds became imperative - you have to know what something is to know how to take care of it. there, while on the front lines of the fight for biodiversity, i discovered the saddest section of the bird guide: extinct birds. in my current field guide, its in the front, as though to remind us that all the rest of the species in this book could go this way, as well. the extinctions marked here are all the unnatural kind - that is, they were created by human activity.
Great Auks, flightless, penguin-like birds, were once numerous off the coasts of New England - hunted for food into extinction during the 16th and 17th centuries. Passenger pigeons, very much like our mourning doves, once ranged across the North American continent, migrating in flocks of more than a billion birds so dense they blocked out the sun. Unbelievably, these birds were hunted into extinction for food, and driven to extinction because the great eastern forests were destroyed as America was settled - these were mostly gone by the end of the19th century. The Carolina Parakeet (that's right, a North American parakeet) met its end around the same time - the victim, again, of an ever-expanding human population. but now we come to the 20th century, when, in our more enlightened state, we should be smarter than to let such precious and important species go the way of the dodo.
the first species i ever cried for was the ivory-billed woodpecker. i don't know, really, what it was about this particular bird that struck me in such a visceral way. i'd certainly never seen one, or had any personal experience with one - it just seemed to me injust that such an innocuous, albeit enormous, bird would have gone extinct because of the machinations of the human species. this beauty was never considered a nuisance, rarely hunted for food, and lived in the deep swamps and bottomlands of the southeast. no, its only crime was living in an area that happened to contain valuable timber, and requiring more land for habitat than capitalism was willing to spare. for a bird?! no, not even for the "king of the woodpeckers," as audubon called them.
"extinction is forever" - we have heard this proclamation enough times to begin to consider it a cliche. well, fortunately, i have the happy news of reporting that this particular cliche (like many others, i might add), happens to not be true! a couple of weeks ago, i saw a short article on the new york times webpage that claimed that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered in a forest in arkansas. (arkansas, for heavens' sake) my firts reaction was suspicion. i mean, people told me extinction is forever, and i believed it. could it be a hoax? not in the new york times, not with the cornell lab of ornithology as the source. amazement and wonderment took the place of suspicion.
what happened was this: researchers at the cornell lab of ornithology had read the report of a kayaker who claimed he had seen a very large, very strange looking pileated woodpecker while out in the woods - they checked it out, and as a result went on a year long search for proof of the bird's existence. in testament to the bird's secretive nature, some of the most experienced birders in the country, searching for over a year, managed to catch a glimpse of a male ivory-bill only seven times, and to accidentally catch a video image of one as it flew alongside a canoe.
and so it's true, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, the ivory-billed woodpecker lives, and i rejoice. however, i also harbor doubts. only a male bird was sighted, and as any good biology student knows, birds do not procreate by any means other than sexually. i hope, i pray fervently to the good gods of ecology that this lucky male, who has had the grace to survive into the 21st century, will be luckier still in finding a mate. if he has a female tucked away into a corner of his big woods, i can only imagine their felicity ... i dream of baby ivory-bills
i bless them with all the love and hope and passion that i possess, and i look forward to the days when we can say for certain - "we almost lost the ivory bill, but gaia gave us another chance to save this precious species, and we rose to the challenge. we accepted the herculean task of reorienting our priorities, and rediscovering that what makes life worth living is as simple as the delight of a child, in watching a bird fly."
