Stories about newly discovered species don’t get nearly the same front-page attention. Our news-gathering institutions could sure use some context. And the clearing of the old-growth forests in the southeastern United States had occurred long before today’s school children are taught the horrors of the internal combustion engine. The birds were magnificent enough to be sought by collectors and hat makers and thus were shot and sold. It was apparently a national bulletin when, in 1907, Teddy Roosevelt spotted three of the creatures during a bear hunt in the swamps of Louisiana. In fact, in the Associated Press story, climate change was featured in the third sentence of the piece.Ĭlimate change - the climate has always changed - cannot possibly explain the ivory-billed woodpecker’s scarcity more than 100 years ago. He and his viewers never saw one.Īs is now routine in all stories having anything to do with nature, climate change is the convenient culprit, however peripherally, in the bird’s disappearance. I believe he was in Mississippi, stomping through brush and wetlands. His excitement when convinced he saw one just there, just there in the highest branch, was palpable. Because I am riveted by such film-making, I watched a documentary not long ago about a fellow searching for the ivory-billed woodpecker. I would have loved to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. His creation was based on the pileated woodpecker. In the unlikely event it ever comes up in a bar bet, Woody, the film-star bird, was drawn by cartoonist Walter Lance in 1940 for Universal Studios. Scientists hope the news of the bird’s passing is premature, but searches have been fruitless for years in the swamps of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.
The ivory-billed woodpecker, for whom Woody Woodpecker is not named, has been declared extinct by the U.S. Soucheray: Context: The ivory-billed woodpecker was already scarce a hundred years ago – Twin Cities
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