Found in Arkansas: Hope on Wings

Emily Dickinson was right: hope is the thing with feathers. What she didn't know was that it lives in an Arkansas swamp and has a big ivory bill.

On Thursday, the day that scientists announced the first confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in 60 years, I went for a short paddle in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the bird was seen. I was with four other people, two from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which had made a major effort to confirm the sighting, and two from the Nature Conservancy, which has been buying land in the area. And I was trying to adjust to the good news.

In fact, I had always preferred Woody Allen's take on Dickinson's poem: "How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not the 'thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich."

Furthermore, as a journalist, I'm not used to good news. There's just not that much of it. So the report that the ivory bill lived took me off guard. I got a bit overexcited and flew down to Little Rock from New York, drove out to Bayou de View in the refuge and got in a canoe.

On a slow bayou, the two canoes slipped through water tupelo and cypress, on slate-colored water, and I talked with Elliott Swarthout and Peter Wrege of the Cornell Lab about the off kilter beauty of swamps and the thing with feathers.

The common wisdom had been that the ivory bill was gone for good, not a bird anymore but a symbol, a reminder of loss. It once lived in southern swamps and bottom land and depended on large areas of old forest, since it needed dead trees for nesting and for feeding on grubs and beetles beneath the bark. Logging squeezed out the ivory bill, turning it into an accusatory ghost.

This was no subspecies of salamander threatened by a housing development. It was the biggest of its kind, something Americans always love. It had a 30-inch wingspan and a jackhammer beak. Audubon called it the "great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe" and others called it the Lord God bird because when people saw it, they said, "Lord God!" But it was gone, one of the natural treasures that a growing country stepped on and broke.

When I talked to experts during a hunt for the ivory bill in Louisiana three years ago, even some of the most dedicated searchers held out little chance of success. Outside the small circle of ivory bill seekers, the bird seemed a lost cause, a particularly sad lost cause for me because I have a soft spot for swampy places. Give me a dark slough over a sunlit meadow any day. Walking through the Louisiana bottom land was both exhilarating, because this part had been saved, and painful, because so much had been lost.

Tim Gallagher, who wrote "The Grail Bird" about the search and the sighting of the ivory bill, said that Bobby Harrison, his partner on the search, wept when he saw the bird fly in front of his canoe. I know of at least one person with no connection to the search who wept on reading the news, and I'm sure he was not alone.

I think it is the reason for the bird's survival. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't luck. And it wasn't simply the resilience of nature, although that helped. The reason for the astonishing re-emergence of a mysterious bird is as mundane as can be. It is habitat preservation, achieved by hard, tedious work, like lobbying, legislating and fund-raising.

There was luck involved, of course. But my favorite comment about luck was made by Branch Rickey, who said, "Luck is the residue of design." Chance favors the protected wetland.

Think about where the bird was found, in a national wildlife refuge, and in an area, the Big Woods of Arkansas, that conservation organizations and government agencies had targeted as crucial for preservation. Just south of the Cache River refuge is the White River National Wildlife Refuge. State refuges are nearby. And the Nature Conservancy has been buying up land in that area.

The same is true about other likely spots. The hunt in Louisiana was in the state's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. When I talked to Scott Simon, the state director of the Nature Conservancy in Arkansas, he said that Arkansas, a poor state, had voted for an eighth-of-a-cent sales tax for conservation, not a large amount, but a tax nonetheless.

I think the reason the discovery is so moving is that so many people worked so hard to save and protect land, telling themselves there may be an ivory bill out there, and that protecting the bottomland had to be important. I'm not sure they all believed it, but they acted as if they did.

As did the searchers. Mr. Swarthout showed me one spot on the bayou where observers on his team would sit in a canoe and wait and watch, for perhaps 10 or 12 hours. The refuge is a beautiful place, the bird is great, but sitting in a canoe for 12 hours has to be tedious and uncomfortable.

It is possible that this is the last ivory bill, that it won't appear again. And we have to trust the judgment and expertise of the scientists involved on the sighting because there is no crystal-clear photograph. Instead, there are detailed observations and an analysis of a blurry bit of videotape.

In most cases, I might hesitate to allow myself to join in the celebration. But I'm going with the experts in this case.

I am giving in to hope. Perhaps there are more ivory bills. I really hope so. The thing with feathers has got me in its grip.

I'm sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. They're beautiful birds and all, but why isn't the birdwatching crowd going out, capturing a couple, and saving DNA to clone `em? We'd still have DoDos running around if we could have done that back then.

No preservationist wants to admit that we could simply save the spiny-longbilled-blue-nosed-sapsucker's DNA and pave over the damn mosquito breeding grounds they live in--they'd rather take private property by declaring it a wetland, and force the owners to assent to myriad environmentally-friendly land use plans in order to use even a quarter of it. God forbid the swamp owners get to use the land they bought by draining those bug bogs and making the land useful for whatever purpose they see fit.

If it's your property, you should own it. No taxes. No restrictions. Enforce covenants, sure, but no way should you have to pay the world rent to live on property you've already bought and paid for. That's not private ownership. That's government ownership. If people want to preserve the birdies or gators or other critters, they ought to be buying the land themselves, not taking my money or land to do it.

I approve of the concept of the Nature Conservancy--although even they are now on the land use plan bandwagon, and I won't donate to them again until they get back in the business of buying property and shutting up about politics.

"I am giving in to hope. Perhaps there are more ivory bills. I really hope so."

If the truth were known I'm fairly certain there a number Ivory Bills out there ~ their existence and where abouts, however, is a closely kept secret. The fear is that, once their existence and location were known, the onslaught of hordes of birdwatchers anxious to add this Holy Grail of rare species to their "Life Lists" would further endanger their survival. Anyone who has witness such a stampede by avid (rabid) birders fully understands and appreciates this concern.

I am a fairly accomplished birder and was certain I saw an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in a rather remote area of the pine woods of east Texas. It was very close and I was able to view it clearly for several minutes ~ long enough to make a good identification. When I reported the sighting to local wildlife officials I was quietly told that, while I "might well have seen what I thought I'd seen" but that, all in all, if it was an Ivory Bill, it would "be best if the bird was left alone."

Howdy, NeverDem! We had some good Birding News in Wisconsin this week, too:

Ospreys land in Franklin - Pair is first in county as birds move south By SUSANNE QUICK squick@journalsentinel.com
Posted: May 2, 2005

Franklin - Perched atop the steel steeple of an electrical substation, a member of Milwaukee County's first recorded osprey pair watched the arriving and departing parishioners of St. Martin of Tours church. Having determined that the churchgoers were not a threat, it flew back to its mate, who was waiting a few yards away in a nest of sticks at the top of a utility pole.

Surrounded by budding willows, oaks and maples, the pair looked out of place among the gray latticework of steel and wire. But it's here near a good-sized pond the fish-eating raptors have chosen to live. And it's at sites like this, across southeastern Wisconsin, that ospreys are settling in.

"They're building nests in all sorts of odd locations," said Sumner Matteson, an avian ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "At the top of a tall light pole in a ballpark, on a crane boom in a gravel pit . . . on top of a cell tower in Madison."

"They like the vantage point they get from these poles," which tend to run between 20 and 40 feet high, he said.

According to Matteson, the number of active osprey pairs in Wisconsin has increased fivefold since the DNR started monitoring osprey nests in the early 1970s: from a low of 82 nests in 1974, to a high of 437 last year. (Yippee!)

The biggest increases in population numbers have been in the northwestern, northeastern and eastern parts of the state. But it's the ospreys' expansion south, into counties such as Milwaukee, Dane and Rock, that has caught the most attention.

That's because these birds have never been documented as living here. (Double Yippee!)

According to Matteson, several factors have led to this southward expansion, including pressure from bald eagles and warm welcomes from the DNR and power companies.

Gradual rebound

And while things are looking good for these diminutive fish-eaters, it hasn't always been so.

Once prevalent in the northern part of the state, ospreys were nearly wiped out in the 1950s and '60s. DDT and other pesticides stripped their eggs of durability, turning the shells into tissue-paper thin films that burst under the weight of an incubating adult. With few eggs surviving, the population crashed.

"They really took it on the chin," Matteson said.

With a ban placed on DDT in 1972, in combination with federal and state recovery and monitoring projects, osprey populations began to rebound.

Indeed, so amazing has their recovery been, ospreys are now surpassing historical numbers, Matteson said. But the situation is not as bright as it may first appear: Osprey numbers are actually dropping in the north-central and west-central parts of Wisconsin.

The drop is the result of nest competition with bald eagles, Matteson said.

Also once at the brink of extinction, bald eagles have enjoyed a rebound in numbers: Up to 992 occupied nests in 2004 from just 107 in 1974. (Triple Yippee!)

But where they have thrived, ospreys have dwindled. Unable to compete, ospreys are being booted out of their native territories and sent packing to the south.

Anticipating the move, the DNR, in conjunction with utility companies such as Pewaukee's American Transmission Co., have built dozens of nesting platforms in southern Wisconsin. Acknowledging the birds' appetite for electrical wires, utility poles and conductors, they have selected sites that enable the birds to live on these high-industrial aeries, without the dangers that usually come with such nest sites - hot wires and power switches.

Last year, an osprey tried to build a nest on top of a conductor, said Terry Yakich, environmental project manager for American Transmission. Concerned the bird might cause a blackout in the neighboring area, Yakich relocated the nest last fall to a more appropriate site a few yards away.

His work paid off - it's here that the new Milwaukee couple have chosen to live.

Elsewhere, throughout the southern part of the state, ospreys are coming to roost at similar sites.

"Ospreys like to be where other ospreys are," said Bill Stout, an independent wildlife biologist who worked for several years to establish an osprey population at Big Muskego Lake. "Maybe they saw the other ospreys" at the lake, which is just a half-mile from their present nest, and decided to settle nearby.

But while their osprey neighbors in Waukesha County may have taken notice, the parish of St. Martin's has not.

"I've asked around," said Diane Winkowski, parish secretary, "but no one seems to have known they were there, much less known what an osprey was."

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