Since Jim Tanner last saw a living ivory-bill, over 70 years ago, the bird has remained "regally beautiful" either dead or alive.
Yesterday, in an editorial titled "Science and Truth: We’re All in It Together" for The New York Times, Jack Hitt writes:
Yesterday, in an editorial titled "Science and Truth: We’re All in It Together" for The New York Times, Jack Hitt writes:
"THE greatest bird news of our lifetime occurred at the height of the
George W. Bush administration. In April 2005, amid a pageant of flags
and cabinet ministers in Washington, John Fitzpatrick, the director of
the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, announced that an ivory-billed
woodpecker had been spotted for the first time in more than half a
century in an Arkansas swamp.
President Bush pledged millions for habitat restoration. This and hundreds of other papers heralded the news...
"The weirdest part of the ivory-bill’s resurrection is that if you look
back through the past four decades, it turns out the bird has come back
to life many times before. The ivory-bill seems to rise like a phoenix
at times of environmental anxiety. And each time the sighting has been
debunked, and then afterward some great section of wilderness has been
declared protected and everyone feels better for a while.
After a 1966 disputed sighting in Texas, 84,550 acres became the Big
Thicket National Preserve. When the ivory-bill was sighted/not sighted
in a South Carolina swamp in 1971, the outcome was the creation of
Congaree National Park. Alex Sanders, who as a member of South
Carolina’s House of Representatives fought to preserve the land, told me
that when people ask him where the ivory-bill is, he says, “I don’t
know where he is now, but I know where he was when we needed him.”
In short, "the ivory-bill is charismatic megafauna, regally beautiful and a natural mascot for fund-raising." Wherever it appears, habitat gets bought and protected. Perhaps remaining a ghost is the Ghost Bird's greatest legacy.
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