[TN-Bird] Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Boom and Bust - at least for tourism?
- From: "Charles P. Nicholson" <cpnichol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:24:03 -0500
From the New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/us/23woodpecker.html?ref=science.
There are several photos linked to the article on the web.
January 23, 2008
Without Proof, an Ivory-Billed Boom Goes Bust
By LARA FARRAR
BRINKLEY, Ark. - David Baxter, 62, has hunted the Big Woods in eastern
Arkansas
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessio
ns/arkansas/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> for most of his life. But these
days, his weapon of choice is an old 35-millimeter camera with a zoom lens,
which he keeps in his blue pickup truck at all times just in case he comes
across an ivory-billed woodpecker.
"God help me, I am trying," said Mr. Baxter, who thinks nothing of
camouflaging himself in front of old swampy cypress trees for up to three
hours in case the elusive bird makes an appearance. "No matter what I am
doing, I am looking."
Before 2005, Mr. Baxter, along with many of his neighbors, had never heard
of an ivory-billed woodpecker. They certainly never imagined such a creature
would emerge from the darkness of extinction and become a symbol of hope for
their increasingly endangered delta towns.
But one day, it seemed one did.
It has been almost three years since a research team, led by Cornell
University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cornell
_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> and the Nature Conservancy
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nature_
conservancy/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , announced the rediscovery of the
ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods - a 550,000-acre tract of
bottomland hardwood forest. Researchers have also reported spotting an
ivory-billed woodpecker in a northwest Florida swamp.
The large, yellow-eyed bird had not been conclusively seen in the United
States since around the end of World War II, and some scientists have
questioned whether the more recent reports of sightings are legitimate.
Nevertheless, the federal Fish and Wildlife
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/fish_an
d_wildlife_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Service has recommended
spending $27 million on recovery efforts for the woodpecker.
The patch of Arkansas bayou where the researchers said they spotted the bird
is in the heart of Monroe County. Once an agricultural and manufacturing
center, the county is now one of the poorest places in Arkansas. For its
roughly 10,000 residents, the reported rediscovery of the ivory-billed
woodpecker fired hopes of an economic turnaround not seen since the soybean
boom of the 1970s.
After the sighting was announced, local economies seemed to benefit for a
while as scientists, bird-watchers and news media outlets from around the
world flocked to Brinkley and to the other communities in the patchwork
quilt of fragmented forest and farmland that surrounds the Big Woods.
"People came from everywhere," said Gene DePriest, who still has an
ivory-billed cheeseburger, salad and dessert on the menu of his barbecue
restaurant in Brinkley. "I sold over $20,000 worth of T-shirts in six
months."
Lately, though, the ivory-billed boom has pretty much been a bust,
especially since researchers and bird-watchers have, so far, failed to take
a definitive picture of the woodpecker. A blurry video clip released when
the rediscovery was announced failed to convince many ornithologists of the
animal's existence. There have since been plenty of purported sightings, but
still no picture.
"It has been kind of a disappointment," said Penny Childs, owner of Penny's
Hair Care and creator of the "woodpecker haircut," which she does not get
many requests for anymore. "The delta could use millions of dollars to build
up our lives, but instead we struggle."
Mrs. Childs, 43, is still cutting hair, but just down the street from her
small one room salon, an empty brick building is all that remains of the
Ivory-Bill Nest gift shop, which closed last January. Down the street, the
former Ivory-Billed Inn and R.V. Park is now a Days Inn.
"I did invest a lot of money in stuff to sell, and I didn't even break
even," Mrs. Childs said. "I have got a whole yard full of wooden woodpeckers
right now."
But beneath the disappointment and piles of unsold ivory-billed T-shirts,
coffee cups and wooden woodpeckers, remnants of the bird are everywhere, and
they can be found with people like Mr. Baxter.
At his home, he has a brown briefcase full of photographs of birds. Most are
blurry shots of hoot owls and hawks taken by an automatic camera he hung 10
feet up a tree in the middle of a swamp. But in two pictures, he swears he
captured the ivory-billed.
"I know what I seen and what I didn't see," said Mr. Baxter, holding two 3x5
photos with tiny black flecks flying against a deep blue sky. "I have been a
hunter all my life, so I know my birds."
Chuck Nicholson
Norris, TN
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