If the mystery surrounding the ivory-billed woodpecker never was resolved, David Luneau and Gene Sparling would still see their efforts as valuable and part of an urgently needed movement to protect habitat for other, more numerous birds.
John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, agrees.
"It was absolutely called for that we spent a considerable" amount of time and effort in the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, Fitzpatrick said Tuesday. Ornithologists did not know in 2004 if there was a recoverable population of the birds with breeding members, "but we did know, we had strong evidence" that one member of the species existed in an outstanding example of its traditional habitat.
"If the bird is not extinct, then there's always hope," he said. Looking for it was a daunting undertaking in such a vast territory with hard to canvass terrain, but there had not been an organized, comprehensive attempt since the 1940s in the places that could support ivory-billed woodpeckers.
"Thanks mainly to the work of The Nature Conservancy," he said, "there has been real progress made in conserving and restoring remnants of the Big Woods, an effort that had been underway already but took on additional force and focus within weeks of the original sighting in 2004, the year before the announcement that an ivory-billed woodpecker had been spotted," he said.
"The conservation work is ongoing and The Nature Conservancy and its partner agencies and organizations are making great progress in the Cache River/White River system.
"The whole process did get a genuine conversation going about the nature of old-growth conditions in the bottomland forests."
It pays to invest in critically endangered species, he said, because no species should be viewed as doomed as long as breeding pairs exist. "This was the intent of our search -- to find a breeding pair if one existed."
Fitzpatrick was lead author of the research paper published by Science in 2005 that reported evidence of the ivory-billed bird's existence, and in 2006 he wrote a scientific paper defending Luneau's video against suggestions it depicts a pileated woodpecker.
In an essay published Aug. 29 by The New York Times, on the centennial of the death of the last passenger pigeon, Fitzpatrick makes the point that humans also should be spending more to protect the habitats of birds that scientifically collected data reveal are in decline.
Fitzpatrick's essay previewed the 2014 "State of the Birds Report," an annual scientific assessment of the health of species across the United States compiled by the U.S. Committee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative -- a 23-member partnership of government agencies and organizations dedicated to bird conservation.
The report shows that some numerous birds are in fact in decline, and "we really should be" paying closer attention to these common birds. Conservationists prioritize species because they represent habitat, and so he suggested there should be a Common Bird Watch List along with the familiar list of endangered species.
The report can be found at stateofthebirds.org.
ActiveStyle on 04/27/2015