With all the bad news lately with the disgusting actions of our Congress, I have found myself looking for good news wherever it can be found. My younger sister, who is studying biology and specializes in ornithology, informed me of this piece of good news. In a world where the world's great experiment in democracy decides to grant dictatorial power to an illegitimately installed war criminal executive branch, it's the small things that still give hope. I take heart in this
news release from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
Avian biologist Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University in Alabama says his team has collected sound recordings and sight records that show ivory-bills may inhabit the Florida panhandle in the Choctawhatchee River basin.
This is in addition to the
reports last year of the woodpecker (which was long thought extinct) living in a remote area of Arkansas. The bird was once reported all over the Southeast and as far north as the Ohio River, but due to habitat destruction, its population has apparently dwindled to a very few small locations of undisturbed forests.
I have read over all the public evidence and am inclined to believe the accounts, and if they are true, it speaks to the urgency of protecting the birds in this area. The Florida Panhandle has been hit by several major hurricanes since the birds were thought to have become extinct in the 1940s -- most recently, by notorious Category 3 landfalling Frederic, Ivan, and Dennis. If a hurricane like Katrina were to make landfall on the birds' location, it would surely wipe out this pocket with its storm surge. That seems highly unlikely to happen this year with the onset of El Niño conditions, which suppress hurricane activity, but it is a concern nonetheless.
The scientists were not able to obtain good photographs of the birds, but they had 13 credible sightings (several of more than one bird), over 200 bird calls that match Ivorybill calls recorded in the 1930s, and 99 "double knocks," the distinctive sound that the bird makes while rapping on trees. These sounds are not associated with other bird species that exist in this area. Additionally, they found cavities in trees that are too large to have been made by other woodpeckers and were confirmed by bill markings to have been made by birds rather than other animals. Ivorybills carved out and nested in such large holes. [Source, Auburn University professor Geoffrey Hill]
This bird requires undisturbed old-growth forest land in which to nest and forage. Such land is exactly what Republican administrations want to cede to big industry. In fact, the last proven photographs of the bird taken in the U.S. were in Louisiana in a spot of land called the Singer Tract, owned by the sewing machine company. The logging rights to the land had been sold, and the land was wiped clean despite efforts by the Audubon Society to save it.
When the sightings in Arkansas were announced last year, the Bush Interior Department publicly played along with conservationists, mainly because it would've been terrible press not to. In the meantime, the administration has supported environmental policies that would harm the prospects of this and other endangered species. This is what Republicans do time and time again: photo-op for political benefit, but support destructive actions after the cameras shift away to something else.
The land in Arkansas had been bought by the Nature Conservancy, an organization dedicated specifically to buying tracts of land to preserve wildlife. The Arkansas habitat is also an extremely large area of land in comparison with the Florida habitat, which covers only about two square miles. The land is owned by the state of Florida. The small size of the habitat makes it that much more vulnerable to environmental destruction around it, and the need to preserve it is thus that much greater.
I don't put much stock in Zogby Interactive polls, but the latest Rasmussen poll on the Florida governor's race puts the Republican, Crist, ahead by four points. (For those who are interested, the Zogby numbers can be found here. They're worse.) I don't live in Florida and haven't followed this race closely, but the Democrat, Jim Davis, boasts a strong environmental commitment on his website. If this race is in fact as close as Rasmussen suggests it is, the reports of this critically endangered bird in Florida -- in a very small and vulnerable location, at that -- give yet one more reason to support a changeover of Florida's executive branch. Win it for the Ivorybills.