Blog leader: "Search for the rare ivorybill" by Don Eckleberry

The ivory-billed woodpecker is what ecologists call a key stone species, a key stone species is a species that indicates environmental stability and it’s a species that is closely tied with other species. The ivory-billed woodpecker relied on a specific food source and therefore occupied large expanses of wilderness, which makes it a hard animal to protect. In high school I had a teacher say that the hardest animals to protect are the ones that no one knows about but everyone sees, meaning an animal that you don’t identify with but you see because it has a large range and a large range is hard to buy. 

I am an avid hiker and bird watcher and I have seen many wood peckers but the way that he describes the ivory-billed is very different from the way that I would have described birds like the pileated, hairy and downy woodpeckers all have a sort of elegance to them they seem to have a level of comfort and calmness that you don’t see in many birds so hearing the ivory-billed described as having a “frantic aliveness” makes me wonder if all the ivory-billed woodpeckers had this quality or if this last bird knew that it was the last one and was trying to prove to itself and others that it was very much alive. I find myself wondering if that last bird knew it was alone in the world, the only one of its kind. Both with the ivory-billed and with Martha the last passenger pigeon, or with any species that is now extinct how must that feel? Do they recognize their significance? Though this is personifying the animals I think that at some level they must know that no more will come after them, which is sadly the truth for so many animals.  Extinction is such a sad topic, one that you try not to think about but cannot avoid and now that humans are the roots cause of s much of it, roughly 200 species a day, it is impossible to ignore. Nothing will change if we as humans live in a state of happy idiocy. 

Both of these last two articles are a call to action, what would you be willing to sacrifice for an animal like the ivory-billed woodpecker, a comedic an awkward bird that you hadn’t heard of before this project?