[va-richmond-general] Re: Nice article
- From: "Jim Blowers" <jimvb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <va-richmond-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 23:37:27 -0400
Interesting how the discovery of a thought-to-be-extinct bird can really
liven up a town. We need to find one to liven up Richmond. The article
says they are going cuckoo over ivory-billed woodpecker T-shirts; I
don't think so; I think they are going woodpecker instead. Woodpecker
burgers? Yuk. I hope they don't. Maybe they'll invent a new dance - "do
the ivory-billed woodpecker with me". Anything for a buck. Fortunately
it seems the bird can hide from the throngs.
Jim Blowers
-----Original Message-----
From: va-richmond-general-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:va-richmond-general-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of IE Ries
Sent: Saturday, 2005 May 21 22:15
To: RAS
Subject: [va-richmond-general] Nice article
http://news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20050521/ts_krwashbureau/_bc_sci_wo
odpecker_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."
You are subscribed to VA-Richmond-General. To unsubscribe, send email to
va-richmond-general-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the
Subject field. To adjust other settings (vacation, digest, etc.) please
visit, //www.freelists.org/list/va-richmond-general.
You are subscribed to VA-Richmond-General. To unsubscribe, send email to
va-richmond-general-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject
field. To adjust other settings (vacation, digest, etc.) please visit,
//www.freelists.org/list/va-richmond-general.
Other related posts:
