The Bird Is The Word By Mike Roselle

The fact is I have driven across the country with these nuts too many times. They hang their heads out the window like a dehydrated coon dog, holding a pair of binoculars tightly with both hands staring at every bush or shrub like they were looking for a lost winning lottery ticket. At some point they scream with excitement and it sounds like they swallowed a June bug. At this point the birder will order you to pull over, and you will think that your passenger requires immediate medical attention. But when the car comes to a stop, they don’t get out, and instead fight over the binoculars. This is because the leather strap is around one of the birder’s neck, and the ensuing chaos usually causes the other birder’s face to turn red and their eyes to bulge out, resulting in a near strangulation. Eventually, after an extended conversation that goes something like, “It is.” “No it isn’t!” “Yes, yes it is!” “No, it isn’t!” one of them will realize it wasn’t a bird at all, but a used Pamper fluttering in the wind.  This will normally happen about every forty-five miles.

But we have to give the birders their due, because unless you have been living in a spider hole with an unshaven Bathist fugitive, you have probably heard by now that the environmentalists, the scientists, the federal government and ten million well-heeled geezer bird watchers were all wrong, and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which has not been seen for sixty years is alive and well in Arkansas, and therefore not extinct, as we were all taught in our high school biology class.

"This is huge, "Frank Gill, a former president of the Audubon Society, told the LA Times. "Its kind of like finding Elvis." Actually, it’s more like finding Elvis hanging out with Sasquatch at a Starbucks, and that means there may be hope for Sasquatch after all, and that Arkansas would be about the only place where they could blend in with the locals.

This is a big deal, and could lead to the purchase of an additional 200,000 acres of prime Big Thicket habitat by the Nature Conservancy. And this is an especially big deal because in days ago pro-logging forces announced a campaign to exterminate any of the birds discovered in the region, as to discourage the creation of any large wildlife preserves in the Big Thicket. A nesting pair of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers requires about three square miles of forest for sustenance, so that even when the birds were widespread, their populations were never dense. It was this need for large areas of forest that drove the bird into near-extinction as the wilderness fell to deforestation. So not only does the bird live, the Ivory Bill will get it’s revenge on the loggers and poachers who fought protection for the Big Thicket back when their was still a good chunk of undisturbed habitat. The bird is back and boy is she pissed off.

In other bird news, a recent land purchase will provide more habitat around Lake Isabella, Calif. for a rare songbird. On April 4, government agencies and the National Audubon Society acquired more than 4,000 acres of Kern County ranch land. The purchase settles lawsuits by environmentalists who charged that the Southwestern willow flycatcher lost nesting sites when runoff filled the reservoir to capacity in 1997. The deal adds 1,662 acres of cottonwoods and willows to the Kern River reserve.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it proves that there is still a great deal of support for endangered species protection, and there is still much critical habitat out there for them that still needs protection, and that a lot of it is in private ownership. So far, I have no outcry from the timber industry about the plan to protect the Big Thicket swamp where the Ivory Bill was discovered. The public is very excited about a bird that most of them didn’t even know existed a week ago. And unlike the case of the Whooping Crane and the California condor, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife didn’t need to spend millions of dollars studying, breeding, releasing and caring for highly venerable reintroduced birds.

"In the end, these incredible birds remind us of a fundamental truth of biology — life finds a way, if we just give it enough room,” Jamie Rappaport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife said in the Times.

The other thing I think is worth mentioning is that while birders are easy to make fun of, they constitute a potent force in the conservation movement, and were among the first to study, understand and promote the protection of biodiversity. Without them, it’s hard to imagine the creation of the Everglades National Park and many of the other large wildlife reserves that shelter not only avian creatures, but many other species of threatened and endangered wildlife. And in a classic example of unorthodox coalitions birders have joined forces with hunters before to create even more protected areas for birds and waterfowl. This is because hunters and birders alike understand the critical role habitat plays in protecting wildlife. So whether you shoot it with a Browning Pump Action or a Nikon Single Lens Reflex, you know the importance of protecting and restoring large intact ecosystems and the necessity of working with others who know that too.

Speaking of woodpeckers, the last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker sighting was back in 1922 by an old unemployed logger named Otis McTubbins who lived in Nacogdoches, Texas, who shot it. He was arrested for illegally taking a protected species, and had testified during his trial that he was simply trying to feed his family and thought it was a wild turkey. “Did you eat it?” asked the Judge. When the old logger nodded his head, the Judge then asked him what it tasted like. “Well”, he replied, “The breast meat was sortta like a Trumpeter Swan, but when Barbequed, the wings tasted more like Spotted Owl”.

 Mike Roselle is back on the road with Floyd in search of intelligent life in alleged Red States. Surprisingly it appears to everywhere. And who says you can’t rig an American election.