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Editorial:
Lessons from finding the ivory-billed woodpecker
At least one ivory-billed woodpecker still inhabits the Big Woods region
of Arkansas, the world learned on April 28, 2005. Yet, 60 years after
the brightly colored big bird was believed to have been hunted to extinction,
it is almost certainly still on the brink.
Gene Sparling, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, first saw the officially rediscovered
ivory-billed woodpecker on February 2, 2004 in the Cache River National
Wildlife Refuge, a relatively dense and impenetrable swamp, not far from
U.S. I-40, which runs in an almost straight line from Memphis southwest
to Little Rock.
Ornithologists Tim Gallagher of Cornell University and Bobby Harrison
of Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, confirmed the Sparling sighting
after accompanying him to the vicinity. David Luneau, of the University
of Arkansas at Little Rock, on April 25, 2004 videotaped the ivory-billed
woodpecker taking off from the trunk of a tree.
Before announcing the find, the scientists enlisted the help of The Nature
Conservancy to purchase more habitat.
No more than one ivory-billed woodpecker has been seen at a time, and
all of the confirmed sightings were of a male––although turkey
hunter, forestry student, and National Rifle Association intern David
Kelivan, 21, claimed to have seen a pair in the Pearl River Wildlife Management
Area of Louisiana, well to the south, on April 1, 1999. That location
is comparably dense swamp, not far from the junction of U.S. I-10, I-12,
and I-59. Kelivan’s account, apparently not an April Fool, convinced
enough experts that teams of biologists repeatedly searched the area for
three years seeking confirmation. Their hopes were dashed when rapping
sounds recorded by remote listening devices turned out to be distant gunfire.
No definite ivory-billed woodpecker nests have been discovered. Yet a
breeding population almost certainly existed not long ago, since the maximum
lifespan of an ivory-billed woodpecker is believed to be no more than
15 years. Even the oldest wild bird on record, a Manx shearwater banded
in Britain in 1953, believed to be still alive, would not be old enough
to be a remnant from 1939, when 22 ivory-billed woodpeckers were seen
at the Singer Tract in Louisiana, after they were twice before believed
to have been extinct, or 1944, when the last nesting was reported, or
1946, when the last bird was seen, other than unverified reports from
Georgia and the Florida Panhandle in the early 1950s.
The Singer Tract was clear-cut in 1948. Believed to have ended any hope
that the ivory-billed woodpecker might ever be seen again, that act of
ecological vandalism helped to impel the 1950 formation of The Nature
Conservancy, now the biggest of all animal-and-habitat-related charities.
The Nature Conservancy was rightly quick to claim credit for preserving
the Big Woods habitat––but dead wrong in citing the rediscovery
of the ivory-billed woodpecker in defense of its policy of attempting
to eradicate non-native species by any means possible, including fire-setting
and inundations with herbicides and pesticides.
The April 2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE detailed, beginning on page1,
thirty-odd years of effort by the Nature Conservancy and National Park
Service to kill feral pigs and other hooved stock on Santa Cruz Island,
off the southern California coast. This effort accelerated in January
2005 with the commitment of $5 million to an all-out attempt to purge
the last pigs within 18 months.
Had the Nature Conservancy attempted to kill feral razorback hogs around
the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge with the same zeal and same methods
used to “protect” the habitat now incorporated into Channel
Islands National Park, the last ivory-billed woodpeckers might have been
among the casualties––just as the now endangered Channel Islands
fox is among the victims rather than the beneficiaries of the Santa Cruz
Island killing.
First the fox population boomed, feasting on dead animals. The foxes were
joined at the carrion piles by golden eagles who flew in from the mainland.
Then, as the carrion disappeared, the eagles turned on the foxes, as well
as the young of the surviving pigs. Now the official line is that eradicating
the pigs will send the eagles elsewhere, but they might eat the last foxes––other
than those in a captive breeding program––before they go.
The habitat where an ivory-billed woodpecker was found survived not because
it was “managed” to preserve native species, nor because it
was remote wilderness, but because it was mostly left alone, being mostly
too wet and full of insects to either “manage” or exploit.
Partisans in the perennial battle over how best to preserve endangered
species quickly claimed the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker
as a victory for their positions, regardless of contrary evidence.
The White House pointed out that finding the ivory-billed woodpecker illustrates
the importance of privately funded conservation. Yet nothing the George
W. Bush administration has done so far has encouraged private conservation,
except by default, as public lands have been opened or re-opened at an
unprecedented pace to hunting, trapping, fishing, logging, mining, grazing,
oil and gas drilling, off-road vehicles, and military training.
The ivory-billed woodpecker may still be just a mindless shotgun blast
or chainsawing of a nesting snag from eternal oblivion.
The only real contribution the Bush administration has made to protecting
either the habitat or the welfare of animals has been by showing that
whatever is saved through politics can be lost the same way. This has
encouraged people who are serious about protecting animals and habitat
to get serious about developing cause-specific bipartisan political clout.
Interior Secretary Gail Norton promised a $10 million federal effort to
promote the recovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, long listed as an
endangered species but without a recovery plan or critical habitat designation.
There have been no heated political battles since 1948 over what should
be done to save it. It was nearly relisted as extinct in 1997.
While the Endangered Species Act is now the front line of legal defense
for the ivory-billed woodpecker, it was first protected by the 1918 Migratory
Bird Treaty Act. This is still the only protection for most migratory
birds in the U.S.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was amended in November 2004, at request
of The Nature Conservancy and other hunter/conservationist organizations,
to exempt from protection any human-introduced “non-native”
migratory species deemed problematic by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
The Fish & Wildlife Service at the time anticipated issuing a “hit
list” of 94 species. In January 2005, the Fish & Wildlife Service
published an expanded list of 113 species that might be extirpated, with
a preface promising that more might be added.
Technically, that could allow the deliberate extirpation of the Cuban
ivory-billed woodpecker, last photographed in 1956 but rediscovered in
1988, if restoration biologists had actually followed through with a hypothetical
scheme to reintroduce ivory-billed woodpeckers to the U.S. by using the
Cuban ivory-billed woodpeckers as seed stock.
This idea remained hypothetical because Cuban biologists doubted that
enough woodpeckers remained to spare any. None have been seen, in fact,
since 1995. In addition, so little is known of either the Cuban or the
U.S. ivory-billed woodpeckers that their exact relationship is anyone’s
guess. Some ornithologists believe they are genetically identical except
for normal family variation. Some say the Cuban woodpeckers are slightly
smaller.
Currently they are classed as related subspecies rather than the same
bird in different habitats. Possibly the only hope for maintaining enough
genetic diversity to save either population may be to introduce the remnants
somehow and hope they “hybridize,” but this might also be species
purists’ worst nightmare.
Many conservationists have yet to recover from the shock of discovering
through DNA evidence that the last red wolves, who shared most of the
historic range of the ivory-billed woodpecker, were in fact wolf/coyote
hybrids. The “pure” red wolf either never existed or was long
ago subsumed by coyotes, who expanded into the wolves’ range after
humans hunted the wolves to virtual extinction.
Just 14 red wolves remained, all captive, when in 1987 the U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Service started a breeding program at Bulls Island, South Carolina.
From Bulls Island came 26 pups who were the progenitors of about 300 red
wolves alive today, including 55 pups born just this spring at the Alligator
River Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.
The red wolf restoration effort survived wise-users’ lawsuits contending
that hybrid animals cannot be considered endangered species, but lost
political support as the coyote ancestry became recognized. In March 2005
the Fish & Wildlife Service removed the last three red wolves at Bulls
Island to save $15,000.
The message all along should have been not that red wolves should be preserved
as a “pure” and therefore supposedly superior lineage, but rather
that predators including both wolves and coyotes are essential to a healthy
ecosystem. If they hybridize in their effort to adapt to changing survival
requirements, the emerging new line is as worthy of appreciation and protection,
and as needed by nature, as the ancestors who contributed to the gene
pool.
Biodiversity
It
is simplistic to argue, as some commentators have, that the rediscovery
of the ivory-billed woodpecker refutes the belief that the earth is undergoing
an “extinction crisis.” The existence or non-existence of one
specimen of a single species makes no strong point on either side of the
debate––though it is to be noted that species discoveries and
rediscoveries continue to exceed reported extinctions by approximately
37-to-1, not including microbes, as ANIMAL PEOPLE editorially noted in
November 2002.
The rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker does underscore other points
that ANIMAL PEOPLE has made repeatedly over the years.
First is that while the visibility of various species has shifted, coinciding
with human-induced habitat change, the abundance of species relative to
each other has no inherent relationship to either biodiversity or the
overall health of ecosystems. Neither are “wilderness” and “optimum
wildlife habitat” to be confused.
One may find high native biodiversity in ecologically fragile “wilderness”
habitats like the Peruvian Amazon, where hardly anything survives in abundance,
non-native species rarely endure the conditions, and almost every large
species is endangered because of human exploitation, including “sustainable”
use by the present gun-wielding “indigenous” residents.
Conversely, one may also find high native biodiversity in older U.S. suburbs,
featuring mature tree canopies, ornamental fruit trees and berry bushes,
and lawns that are at least nocturnally accessible to grazing and burrowing
animals. Along with the native biodiversity will be abundant non-native
species, filling vacant niches and expanding the web of life.
The newly rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker is in what might be described
as fragmented habitat, from which it may be unable to expand and recover.
Yet the ivory-billed woodpecker might recover quite well as more of the
wetland woodlots alongside interstate highways mature into old growth,
forming corridors that are gradually reconnecting habitat fragments into
a meandering greenbelt ecosystem. Already these largely unplanned greenbelt
corridors have helped opossums, coyotes, and whitetailed deer to extend
their range. Grass divider strips have helped nonmigratory Canada geese
to find their way from sites where they were introduced to be hunted to
suburbs, where they are now considered common lawn pests.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was Exhibit A for an “extinction crisis,”
because as recently as 150 years ago it was occasionally seen throughout
the Southeast. Unlike the Carolina parakeet, which vanished during the
same decades for the same reasons, the ivory-billed woodpecker was not
narrowly confined to one habitat. Yet unlike the passenger pigeon, once
the most abundant and broadly ranging of all lost North American species,
the ivory-billed woodpecker was rare even according to early 19th century
observers Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon.
The ivory-billed woodpecker might be best compared to the California condor,
another widely ranging bird who is memorably spectacular but has always
been scarce. After 23 years of captive breeding, the last 22 California
condors have become a population of 240, about half living in the wild,
soaring over five western states and northern Mexico. Reintroduction has
succeeded largely because of increased human tolerance, not only of spectacular
wild megafauna but also of common “nuisance” species, both native
and non-native, whose remains form much of the condors’ diet.
The chief lesson taught by both the partial recovery of the California
condor and the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker ought to be
to appreciate wildlife of every variety. Neither species exists today
because something else was massacred to save it. Both exist as a bonus
for allowing other animals of many different kinds the space and opportunity
to thrive.
