I think I must have been nine years old when my parents gave me my first bird book: How to Know the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson.
I was hooked, and I got as many bird books from the library as I could. One of those early tomes — maybe the Peterson book, maybe not — had a stunning painting of a huge bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, with a little notation reading “Feared extinct.”
I found it horrifying; we could actually manage to kill — directly or indirectly — every last one of an animal. I would never see an ivory-billed woodpecker. That was my first glimpse into the gaping maw of environmental destruction that constitutes human activity on this planet.
Since then, countless species have met the same fate. Habitat is vanishing quickly while our appetite increases; I wonder if my daughter will grow up in a world without polar bears, elephants or wild salmon.
So against that pessimistic backdrop emerges an old friend. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still alive and hammering trees in an Arkansas forest.
If you aren’t a birder, you might find it hard to understand just how huge that piece of news is. the ivory-billed woodpecker competes with the passenger pigeon as the mascot for extinction in the bird world. Having it return is an enormous sign of hope.
But let’s be clear. It’s not hope that things are turning around, or that the planet is on the comeback trail. The hope that last month’s announcement offers is that it’s not too late. And the message isn’t to do less to prevent species extinction, but to do more.
By the way…
While Cornell University was announcing the return of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Alabama was announcing the return of two species of snail thought to have been wiped out in the damming of the Coosa River — the largest extinction in U.S. history.
Not quite the poster kids that ivory-billed woodpeckers are… but every bit as important.
