28 April 05

Ivory-billed Hope

Everyone I know, pretty much, sent me notice today of the announcement of the first sightings of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the United States since 1944.

Thank you. All of you. Each time I relived it. I read a lot today about the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Nature Conservancy and efforts to hear the bird but the thing that got me the most was that two ornithologists traveling on the water with Arkansas naturalist Gene Sparling who had seen the bird eariler, and who cried out in unison “ivory billed!” as the huge woodpecker flew out in front of their boat, and who then set about making independent sketches (essential in the absence of any photographs), frantically adding notes till they could do no more, responded by sobbing and silence.

The world’s a mess. All the work I see being done around me every day to study, preserve, explain the natural world seems like a drop in the ocean, given the devastation we are wreaking on the planet. Yet today, all of it—ALL of it—is given new hope.

The paper by Fitzpatrick et al. published today in Science can be downloaded here. The supplementary materials contain the two sketches.

Posted by at 07:35 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Some people might not understand why anyone would weep over the sighting of a bird, but hearing this news was like having it confirmed that elves and fairies still had not lost their ground in our imagination. If I close my eyes I can just glimpse that black, red and white ghost flicker across the silence of the empty woods, a momentary rush of joy.

    — butuki    29. April 2005, 19:40    Link
  2. I got all misty-eyed last year when I saw Sibley’s painting (not in the fieldguides, of course) of the ivory-billed, and I bought Joe Phillip Hoose’s book The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, for last Christmas. Hearing that someone had seen it live—that those rumors of the last two years or so might be true—Lord God, what a feeling!

    You might be amused to hear that the Cornell and NatCon people are calling the individual in that little video clip “Elvis.”

    — Ron Sullivan    1. May 2005, 19:06    Link

Previous: Next: