[va-richmond-general] Nice article

  
http://news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20050521/ts_krwashbureau/_bc_sci_woodpecker_wa_1

   
  Downtrodden Arkansas towns see salvation in rediscovered bird 
  By Seth Borenstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers Sat May 21, 4:08 PM ET 

  CLARENDON, Ark. - About one-quarter of the downtown shops are boarded up. The 
two factories - a steel basket manufacturer and a shoe company - fled for 
Mexico about four years ago. Many of the children leave town after graduation. 

  But suddenly there is hope, talk of new motels being built, and a flock of 
newly printed T-shirts for sale. And the kids, at least the much younger kids, 
are showing civic pride with a strange multi-colored, moussed-up $25 
"woodpecker haircut."
  And it's all thanks to a bird.

  Not just any bird, mind you, but an ivory-billed woodpecker. It's a bird that 
for 60 years was thought to be extinct. But here in the Arkansas Big Woods 
region, it is alive again.

  Now Clarendon - population 1,751 and shrinking every census - and all of 
Monroe County, which in January 2004 had a double-digit unemployment rate, 
hopes to copy the ivory-bill and rise from what everyone said was a certain 
death.

  "This might be the thing that gets us going," Clarendon Mayor Don Boshers 
said Saturday morning during a birding festival that attracted 2,000 people to 
the town square along the banks of the White River.

  But the very bird tourism that this area embraces could end up crushing the 
ivory-bill's habitat and send it fleeing or worse. Parts of the Cache River 
National Wildlife Refuge were quickly closed to anyone but a select dozen 
scientists with special research passes. Interior Secretary Gale Norton asked 
people not to come. Officials went on bird watching Web sites to say stay away.

  "We were afraid that literally 20,000 birders were going to descend on 
central Arkansas and love this bird to death," U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 
regional director Sam Hamilton told a town hall meeting in Stuttgart on 
Thursday.

  After a month of worry and a mere trickle of tourists - mostly because summer 
is a bad time to visit to look for birds due to heat, mosquitoes, snakes and a 
thick tree canopy that's hard to see through - officials are breathing a little 
easier. This past week they opened some of the restricted areas.

  "We don't expect summer to be that bad," Hamilton said.

  By fall and winter, when birders are expected to arrive in earnest, new 
visitor towers, boardwalks and stands may be ready. Still, the chances of 
seeing an ivory-bill are slim, based on the fact that researchers made only 
seven sightings during 20,000 hours of looking.

  Because the Big Woods - an area that includes both the White River and Cache 
River National Wildlife Refuges - is so thick with towering trees, swamps, 
bayous, rivers, and lakes, it can accommodate a lot of people. Yet the 
notoriously skittish ivory-bill would likely not notice all the birders, 
officials and conservationists hope.

  "There is so much space for both the bird and the people who want to come, 
look at it, that we're really very fortunate," said Scott Simon, Arkansas 
director of The Nature Conservancy, which helped coordinate the woodpecker 
search and bought new land around the refuges to expand the habitat. "There 
must be something going right in this ecosystem because this bird has been here 
for decades with all these other people."

  In the newly reopened swamps of Bayou DeView on Friday, Hamilton told Knight 
Ridder Newspapers that Saturday's fourth annual Big Woods Birding Festival 
would be a good test to see if tourism and the bird can co-exist. The festival 
attracted two-and-a-half times more people than last year, but so far no ill 
effects to the woodpecker were noted, Mayor Boshers said.

  The man who started it all, bird re-discoverer Gene Sparling, who has been 
coordinating search teams, figures tourism and the ivory-bill will live well 
together.

  "I expect great numbers of people to come," Sparling said. "I actually expect 
it to be a wonderful thing."

  So do all the towns here. In a way, the towns all have competing claims to 
the woodpecker.

  County seat Clarendon, which is the junction of the two wildlife refuges the 
ivory-bill roams through, figures it's the logical place to visit, especially 
since it hosts the birding festival. Bigger Brinkley, which is even closer to 
the "hot zone" where the bird was actually found, claims to be the home of the 
woodpecker - and it has chain motels and restaurants, unlike its neighbors. St. 
Charles is the home of a new visitor's center at the White River National 
Wildlife Refuge that was finished a day after the re-discovery was announced. 

  They all are going cuckoo over the ivory-billed woodpecker T-shirts for sale 
- not bad considering the bird's re-discovery was announced just four weeks 
ago. There's a new children's woodpecker book, a woodpecker burger, the 
woodpecker haircut, a duck hunting lodge that changed into a birding lodge, 
guides offering woodpecker-searching trips, large $45 wooden woodpecker lawn 
and office art, and it's all cashing in here at the birding festival. 

  That is a key to keeping the bird alive, The Nature Conservancy's Simon said. 
The local communities must claim ownership of the bird. And in a series of 
three town meetings, the most frequent comment - aside from technical questions 
about how to see the elusive bird - was a worry that the federal and state 
governments weren't shutting down enough land to save the bird. 

  "It's actually just really cool," said Sparling, who lives across the state 
in Hot Springs. 

  For local residents, it's more than cool; it's providential. 

  "We've tried to find something that would just give us economic rescue," 
Clarendon City Clerk Billie Hasty said. "And lo and behold, the bird flew in." 


 

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