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Responsible hunters and fishermen are owed a great debt from those that enjoy the outdoors and wildlife!
Posted on 12/13/2005 9:21:18 AM PST by Rio
A hunting lodge with antler chandeliers and stuffed ducks on the walls seems a strange place to celebrate the comeback of the ivory-billed woodpecker, but wildlife officials are doing exactly that.
They credit hunters in particular with helping bring the rare bird back from presumed extinction in the Big Woods section of Arkansas.
"The people of Arkansas, the hunting and fishing community, conserved these woods," Scott Simon of The Nature Conservancy told reporters on Monday at the Mallard Pointe Lodge, where a coalition of environmentalists, academics and wildlife officials rejoiced in woodpecker's return to the living.
Simon said hunters and others helped save the bird in large part by buying Duck Stamps, at $15 each. These stamps are not for postage, but pay for a federal migratory bird conservation fund, and eventually added up to $41 million to reclaim much of the habitat of the endangered woodpecker.
"The $41 million went into the land before the ivory bill showed up," Simon said.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was believed extinct for the last 60 years, and various reports of sightings of the big bird -- jet black and bright white with a red crest on the male -- were dismissed by professional ornithologists.
Their scepticism was warranted because of the destruction of the big old trees over much of the American southeast that began after the U.S. Civil War. The ivory bill's large size, with a body perhaps 20 inches (50 cm) long means it needs large trees to nest in. It is known to scale the bark off old, dying and dead trees to get at the cigar-sized grubs that live there.
550,000 ACRES OF FOREST
But that was before an amateur naturalist said he saw one while paddling in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in February 2004. When he brought two bird experts to the same spot, they saw it too. And when a professor captured the bird in flight in fuzzy but authentic video, an analysis of all the data pointed to the startling fact that the ivory bill was back.
The ivory bill's public rediscovery last April energized a massive search in eastern Arkansas. Starting in November, teams of paid experts and volunteers have been scouring the Big Woods for signs of the bird.
In this, too, hunters are allies, according to Scott Henderson, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
"The deer hunter and the duck hunter out there are some of the best eyes and ears we've got," Henderson said. "We have 7,000 hunters in this same area for eight hours at a time or more in some cases."
Good observers are essential to catching a glimpse of the camera-shy ivory bill. So far, some 20,000 hours of searching by dozens of trained observers have failed to spot the bird. But that is understandable, given each woodpecker's presumed 12 mile (20 km) foraging range. Experts do not know how many ivory-billed woodpeckers might exist in this area.
The total search area in Arkansas takes in 550,000 acres (222,600 hectares) of forest and swamp. Since last year, searchers have covered about 160 square kilometers (62 square miles).
Henderson acknowledged that hunters were concerned at first that the urge to protect the woodpecker's habitat would limit access to hunting areas, but he said this has not happened.
Game officials want to avoid what Henderson called a "spotted owl situation" -- the clash of interests that occurred in the 1980s between wildlife preservationists and loggers in the U.S. northwest over protecting the small bird.
The first time that Arkansas, pecker and Bill were used in a sentence and it was not about the 42nd President.
If you'd like to be on or off this new (maybe) Upper Midwest (WI, IA, MN, MI, and anyone else) list, largely rural issues, please FR mail me. And ping me is you see articles of interest.
That has been proven over and over. Hunters are the original conservationists, and the most successful, but the press rarely reports this.
Good to hear. Any time I read something like this, it makes me that much more annoyed at the anti-hunting crowd.
Lets give the Clintons credit for something. They gave the bird to Arkansas.
proud_yank,
All the anti hunting organizations do is raise money. You'll not find them contributing to habitat restoration like hunters.
Are you familiar with the Pittman/Roberson Act and the money raised by hunters since the 1930s? Hunters have raised billions and much of that goes to purchase wildlife refuges, etc. Hunters paid for all the wildlife refuges, yet the big AR and green organizations tried to kick hunters off the refuges back in the 1990s; these groups filed lawsuits attempting to do just that.
Rarely do you read about these contributions outside of hunting/fishing media. The MSM would have you believe hunters are just killing all the wildlife. Contributions like this don't usually make the news, but let three PETA girls get naked and it makes headlines in all the MSM.
Actually the more common name among Southern people was "Lord-God". My father, born 1893, knew this name, and I think he applied it to the pileated woodpecker, which is still fairly common in north Louisiana. It's very similar to the ivory bill but is smaller and has less white on the wings. I have a few on my place in the woods, and they used to irritate me bacause their call sounds like the old mechanical-ringer telephone (at least, to me).
FReepmail me to be added or removed to the ECO-PING list!
Responsible hunters and fishermen are owed a great debt from those that enjoy the outdoors and wildlife!
But I thought all hunters will kill bambi. After I was married eons ago, I had to put my rifles in moth balls never to be used again.
I saw one of these in my woods in west Tennessee 2 years ago.
"HahahaHAha"!
That's arguable, because the evidence for the bird's existence is, so far, beyond sketchy, not to mention that all the hooplaa is providing TNC cover when they are trying to cut off a 1,000 farmers from getting water in order to make their 200,000 acres of land easier to take.
From the article: Good observers are essential to catching a glimpse of the camera-shy ivory bill. So far, some 20,000 hours of searching by dozens of trained observers have failed to spot the bird.
Good observers have failed to find the bird for over 60 years. There's an article out on this story you should read. When it comes online I'll post it to this thread.
Here are some facts:
The TNC and Cornell delayed announcement of the sighting for over a year. That delayed getting credible ornithologists in the area to find the bird before it moved. Such a delay is an EXTREMELY unusual practice among birders.
The authors and the "peer reviewers" of the article describing the sightings were comprised ENTIRELY of people directly employed or on the board of directors of the TNC. Virtually all of them stand to gain financially from the grant money to aid "recovery."
The only documentation of the "sighting" is an audio tape of the supposed double rap of the bird and a video tape that is as suggestive as pictures of bigfoot. Even Cornell ornithologists admit this is "sketchy evidence."
So far, $20 million has been spent on "recovery" of a species that hasn't been confirmed to exist.
If anybody but an environmental "scientist" hustled that kind of money with a profit interest and came up dry, they'd end up in the slammer for fraud. I am not saying that it's impossible for the bird to exist. It is however, extremely unlikely. There is good reason for skepticism about this story.
Thank you for telling it like it is. I expressed considerable reservation about this when it was announced, and was roundly criticized by the environmentalist on that group. I suspect all of the adulation for hunters is to try to get support for even more money. To me the smell of fish is even stronger than it was a year ago.
Of that there is no doubt.
Video of latest sighting here (click on third photo on page, next to "News Release":
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/multimedia/videos
(That's NOT a pileated woodpecker. We have pileateds up here in southern New Hampshire, and they've flown really close by me several times. The ivory-billed has lots more white in the wings.)
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