Without question the leak out of Arkansas that researchers documented a bona fide sighting of the great ivory-billed woodpecker, with video and audio, constitutes the most important and interesting news out this week - maybe this year.

While the breaking news story was covered, it was not the lead story in any newspaper or television news show anywhere, national or local, in part because of the political and media climate today. It just demonstrates how screwed up the priorities are in this corporate Christian Republican nation, where a nutjob like Pat Robertson gets prime time respect on the Sunday morning talk shows with a non-journalist like George Stephanopoulos.

Nor is it considered important information in Washington, D.C., where the interest in President Bush holding hands with a Saudi prince almost eclipsed Michael Jackson’s trial for a day. Imagine that. Meanwhile, how can we hold any expectation for democracy in the Middle East when there is not even a word in Arabic for “citizen.”

All the while it turns out the Republicans started using this language of “Armageddon” and a “nuclear option” on presidential judicial nominees well before the current fight over the president’s court nominees, which of course is only a warm up for the brawl that could erupt - depending on how radical Bush gets on impending openings on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course it is hard for the average American to get overexcited about an ivory-bill woodpecker in Arkansas, when folks in the suburbs worry more about things they come in contact with - like the dreaded poison ivy. (For the sake of full disclosure, I got a dose of the insidious oil on my forearms and shins last week; dried it out in the sun and wind of Jazzfest).

But make no mistake about it, the ivory-bill story is important - if only we had a Congress, a White House and newsrooms full of people who cared.

It is quite impossible in this sort of blog post to really tell the story - without the resources to go there to the bottomland hardwood forests of the Lower Mississippi River in what they call the “Big Woods of Arkansas.”

If you want to see the story written like it should be written, make a donation to The Locust Fork and we will do it justice. We are still in the midst of a fund raiser to buy a used laptop, a digital camera, a canoe - and a little food and gas money.

Link Note: In the original post on the ivory-bill story, which many of you may have learned of from The Locust Fork e-mail release or the blog post, we included a link to Cornell’s link to The Birds of North American Online. After realizing that a subscription is required to use it, we found a free one that is just as good. The National Wildlife Federation’s e-nature bird guide works just fine.

One of the main reasons to pay attention to this is because it is an incredibly useful tool for identifying the birds in your back yard. Do you ever stop to notice? Don’t you ever wonder what kind of bird that is migrating through in spring?

As it happens, we had two rose-breasted grosbeaks visiting our bird feeders all week. From a distance and at a glance, you might mistake them for red-headed woodpeckers.

The ivory-bill find, however, is full of ramifications for science, for the environment, for politics - for the economy.

Intrigued?

We’re on it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Under the Microscope. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.