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April 28, 2005
Grail bird!
I remember when NPR ran a story a couple of years ago about a disappointed excursion in Louisiana, searching for the ivory billed woodpecker, a species last sighted in 1944. Yet incredibly, they actually do still exist, in Arkansas. Even if you're indifferent to birds, this is big news. There are survivors—at least one of 'em, and hopefully more. It's both concretely and symbolically important.
Update: Metafilter has some links, notably to Mary Scott's moving account of sighting the bird. She concludes,
The strangest thing about seeing a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker was that it was just a bird, albeit a magnificent one, going about its life in the swamp. We humans tend to project our angst about the damage we have done to our natural world on icons of loss, like the ivorybill. Happily, the bird I saw was doing fine. He was cruising around a beautiful world, on a beautiful day, and although he may have been wondering if there was a female around, or how his little family was doing, he wasn't burdened with gloomy thoughts of extinction. That is our burden to bear.
Posted by senioritis at April 28, 2005 08:52 PM