I’ve stayed out of the “rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker” arguments since they started with the announcement almost a year ago that one had been seen in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, but - having just spent a week in the US with two prominent bloggers and discussed the issue with them - I feel almost driven to add my tuppence/two cents worth.

I’m not going to speculate or deliberate on the identity of the bird in the now infamous Luneau video - I’ve never seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (IBWO) and I don’t even seem to be very good at finding Pileateds, besides which sceptical experts like David Sibley et al get shot down so what hope would I have of usefully contributing anything? Absolutely nothing. No, my interest is more along the lines of - “Just what is the debate going to achieve?”

For those birders who haven’t followed the “rediscovery” debate it’s hard to appreciate just how hard the story has gripped US birders. The latest twists and turns recently published in “Science” magazine have even made headlines in some heavyweight newspapers, and the Arkansas Governer, Rep. Mike Huckabee, felt moved enough to comment (somewhat recklessly) that Sibley wasn’t a good enough birder to know an Ivory-billed Woodpecker when he saw one…

It’s easy to understand why the Arkansas Governor might be concerned that a few leading lights in the birding world might be debunking the rediscovery. Call me sceptical, but I find it hard to imagine that he has the woodpecker’s interests at heart (he was quoted as warning that “extraordinary efforts to protect him [the IBWO] might harm the “ecobalance” forged with farming, logging, and hunting to date” in the Memphis Flyer) - more likely he’s worried about the $US10 million granted by the federal government to protect woodpecker habitat *, the impact on tourism revenues, and his own popularity with the businessmen/voters cashing in on the State’s new-found “bird” fame with dodgy and frankly unappealing merchandising including baseball caps and “Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Cheeseburgers” and “Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Salads.” (where were these businesses when the habitat was being logged and threatened with flooding from dams?).

But why has a woodpecker - beautiful and evocative of the “wilderness” as it is - stirred up so much emotion in some people? Most Americans had probably never heard of the IBWO before last year, let alone have any interest in one. Birders of course knew of it and dreamt about seeing one - but anyone else? Don’t misunderstand me, I would be ecstatic if the IBWO has somehow survived, but the”rediscovery” of the IBWO has been trumpeted as one of the most important conservation stories in the US for a long time, “kind of like finding Elvis” apparently. Is it a conservation story though - or a short-term redemption story that will go nowhere?

Having trashed the vast swamp woodlands in the south-east US with what, from the outside, seems like scant regard at all for the wildlife and eco-systems being destroyed, would the survival of the IBWO somehow compensate, would it enable the American public - and developers and loggers - to breathe a sigh of relief and say, “See, we’re not that bad after all”? Would they act en-masse, rise up and be determined that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker be protected forever? Or is it more about being allowed a temporary second chance - “an opportunity we Americans don’t often get these days when dealing with the environment…a second chance to redeem the habitat, the species and, implicitly, ourselves (Refugenet.org)”?

I only ask because speaking from a non-US birder’s perspective - and as someone deeply involved in conservation in such ‘outposts’ as Asia - I was utterly bewildered by the return of the anti-environmental Bush administration by a now apparently energised and conservation-orientated American public two years ago, am angered by the renewed threats to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, by the recent news that some US National Forests are to be sold to private investors, by the hysteria and fear being generated throughout the US by the “bird flu pandemic that could kill half the US population” (to quote a US Fox News anchorman I heard on 15th March 2006). Sure, there seems to be quite a few birders in the US - but from over here there doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite amongst the general public for environmentalism or conservation action.

Perhaps I’m completely wrong, but before anyone shouts me down here are some facts worth considering: under the Endangered Species Act (ESA - supposedly one of the most important species protection acts anywhere in the world and under which protection any Ivory-billed Woodpecker population/s would come), there were (of March 2005) 1263 listed species in the U.S. Of those, over 200 did not have recovery plans and only 478 had designated critical habitat. Fewer than 10% of the organisms protected by the Endangered Species Act were recovering, a third were declining, and another third lacked sufficient data to determine a trend…over half the (insufficient) expeditures for the ESA went to protect fewer than a dozen of the 1263 species (thanks to the admirable Nuthatch of bootstrap analysis for the online summary). The ESA is under increasing attack by the current US administration: Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA), a rancher from central California, has worked hard for years to undermine the ESA, and recently Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) introduced S. 2110, the “Collaboration and Recovery of Endangered Species Act” (CRESA) - legislation designed to “undermine the protectionist mandate of the ESA. If passed, CRESA would make habitat protection requirements completely discretionary, eliminate mandatory timelines for listing decisions, allow developers to destroy one species by protecting another, give industry interests final say over species recovery plans, and provide tax breaks to developers to comply with the law” (http://www.awionline.org/pubs/Quarterly/06-55-01/06_55_1p1011.htm).

Just what ‘conservation’ would be offered to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker? Long-term new funding, or a diversion of over-stretched funds from a less glamorous species (a fish perhaps) to the new poster-selling “Lord God bird” as it’s been dubbed (can someone tell me why?). If this “rediscovery” ignites a passion amongst the American public to get off their sofas, donate money, put down their guns, drive more fuel-efficient cars, turn down the thermostats in their town-sized shopping malls, and get actively involved in conservation of their threatened natural resources - then we’re taking about a conservation story. If what we’re talking about is a way to deflect attention from all the godawful destruction and waste going on everywhere else by concentrating on a “good news” story then we’re not. We’re talking about marketing and “greenwashing”.

It’s very easy for birders/conservationists to over-estimate the long-term interest and concern of the public (ie the rest, and the majority, of the human population) in stories like these. We get frantically involved and do all we can to drag an uncommitted and largely uninterested populace along with us - and we often fail. I’m speaking from experience of my work on behalf of Asia’s shorebirds of course: the Spoon-billed Sandpiper occupies much the same place in the hearts of European and Asian birders that the IBWO does in the hearts of North American birders, but we have demonstrably failed to get enough people outside our own small world interested to guarantee this unique and wonderful bird a future. In fact, the time will surely come soon when conservationists along the East Asian/Australasian Flyway will be searching for Spoon-billed Sandpipers and hoping against hope that somehow a tiny population of “Spoonies” have survived the development and destruction of their breeding, staging, and wintering grounds…

The arguments over whether the IBWO does or doesn’t still exist are vitally important and need to be decided one way or the other as soon as possible, as much because long-term strategies need to be agreed upon as because of the fact that the public will lose interest far more quickly than we think. And it is the public that votes in politicians, the public therefore that decides how much funding there will be and how it will be spent, the public therefore that will ultimately decide the fate of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Not us birders/conservationists/environmentalists - the public.

So, what do we think then: long-term crucially-important conservation story or short-term news item? Let me know…

(*Compare that amount, incidentally, with Bush’s request for $7.1 Billion to fund The National Strategy’s Critical Goals Of Safeguarding America against “Bird Flu” - which includes $1 billion to “stockpile enough antiviral medications to help treat the Nation’s first responders” ie Tamiflu, a drug that is known to be ineffective in low-dosages against H5N1 and to have as one of its major share-holders one Donald Rumsfeld.)