This is the one of the most thrilling pieces of news in my lifetime! The ivory billed woodpecker is confirmed alive in Arkansas!
please see the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7666344/
alot of us are lovers of birds, wildlife and nature in general…this is a day to celebrate!!
I knew it was alive and never stopped believing. Oh happy day!!!
ummmmm…yeah…I’m real happy about his too…ummmm…I guess…
I lived in Arkansas for 4 years…look close enough, and you’ll find alot of things there that you never thought existed!!
This is the one of the most thrilling pieces of news in my lifetime! The ivory billed woodpecker is confirmed alive in Arkansas!
please see the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7666344/
alot of us are lovers of birds, wildlife and nature in general…this is a day to celebrate!!
I knew it was alive and never stopped believing. Oh happy day!!!
Coincidentally, I took my seven year old daughter to a bird-watching talk, in which the presenter mentioned that the ivory-billed was “possibly” extinct. Remembering the recent failed attempts to record its call in Louisiana, I thought “ha, it’s toast”. I’m very glad to be shown wrong!
Cool! Thanks for pointing this out. There are people who care.
That’s great news.
The Ivory Billed Woodpecker is closely related to the Piliated Woodpecker which we get in the wooded areas near where I live( Southern Ontario) they are impressive looking birds. Much larger than all the other woodpeckers and when they are working on a tree, you can hear it for miles around. In fact, I heard and then saw one( A Piliated) last weekend while I was at my cottage up north of Toronto.
Fleck
Good stuff… they were interviewing the witnesses and researcher on NPR this morning.
What if gods plan was that this bird make like a Dodo and die off…and we are spinding millions to try and stop nature…huh…
That’s cool. There was a good piece on NPR maybe a year ago about trying to record the sound with remote microphones.
That is a beautiful bird and I am happy that we have not yet wiped it off the face of the planet,
I’ve always been sceptical of extreme conservation activists. You know, the people who find the last male whatchyamagig in Paris and the last female whatchyamagig in San Diego and spend countless years trying to make them reproduce. It seems we spend a lot of time and money on the most hopeless cases (the Panda being a great example) where we could spending that time on preventative measures like conservation of goods - so we would need to destroy all these lovely animals’ habitats faster than they could be rebuilt.
Evolution, my friends, has a way of weeding out the weak. Humans have and will continue to wipe out several species. In the history of the Earth, lets face it, we are in a quantum leap of progression. A new species has arrived and it is completely dominating all other forms of life. This is not the first time this has happened, but it is the first time we are experiencing it. Example: before the arrival of grass and flowers, all land was covered trees or very little at all. When flowering plants moved in, the complete wiped out the vast majority of existing tree species. The trees we see today had to adapt to compete with the grasses. Would we have cried a tear for those trees? Probably. Would it have made any difference? Nope.
I hate to sound cheezey, but “life will find a way.” If there is one undeniable pattern in the history of Earth, it is that. For every species we wipe out, another, better-adapted one appears. We suddenly “discover” it and assume it has been here forever, when it may be possible that it is a new species (this is far more common with lower level life than with large animals like mammals, but lower level life is much more abundant).
We are in a leap right now, and, right now, humans are kicking ass. But other species will catch up in a few millenia; things will equalize, and something WILL replace humans (a super-intelligent dolphin, perhaps?).
For now, let’s try to convince people not to catch and kill everything that moves so that we may enjoy the great variety of life on this planet.
Si that a picture of an Ivory-billed?
It looks more like a Piliated Woodpecker to me.
I remeber seing one of those in a state park once. Magnificent bird.
soggybottom, you have to understand that humans are now effecting environmental change on a timescale much faster than evolution can adapt to in most cases. Evolution as we think of it in the context of producing the rich and varied biosphere that we enjoy today over the course of hundreds of millions of years has ceased to occur, and there is a new paradigm–one in which evolution is virtually a non-factor. If we wait for evolution to kick in and knock humanity down a few pegs, well, don’t hold your breath (which is not to say we won’t find a way to do it ourselves much sooner). Nate
We have a lot of red-headed woodpeckers out here. I often see them while out on long runs and always wonder if woodpeckers get a headache? Could you imagine pounding your face into a tree all day long?
Sorry for this post.
Mike
One of the things that struck me out of Bio 122 was how fast evolution occured in short stints of time. Sometimes 1000’s of new species (that hapened to get fossilized) appeared in just a few thousand years. Granted, we are killing a lot of species off, but we are also cleaning out a whole bunch of niches for new species to grow into. It seems the conditions are ideal for that sort of growth.
However, I do very much share your concern about destroying the fragile conditions for life that we have here. It might be interesting to see if life, now that it’s here, can adapt to a more harsh environment. Luckily, I agree that I think humans will destroy each other before they have time to completely destroy the necessary conditions for life… if we even know what those are.
here’s a pileated:
and here is the ivory billed, a picture from 1935–these seem to be babies, as the birds reach near 20 inches as adults:
they are both big and black, but the ivory bill is huge and looks like nothing on this earth. that’s why people say: lord god what a woodpecker!
mike–why be sorry? they way the pound so rapidly is amazing. one would think it hurts! as you can tell by now i’m totally fascinated with woodpeckers and love each and every one of them.
they have millions of air bubbles in the front of their heads that acutally keep them from hurting their necks heads. it’s amazing!
Ooops, my bad.
no, they have similarities and alot of people think they see an ivory billed when really it’s a pileated. they’re both black and crested and look like nothing else.
see, the birds geeks like me know the difference…for most people it’s a common mistaken identity and alot of articles even talk about the confusion between the two. 
I wasn’t confusing the two different species, what threw me off was that in the original painting you posted the male bird had red on the back of it’s head. Clearly a piliated.
the dodo didn’t exactly “die off”
.
One of the things that struck me out of Bio 122 was how fast evolution occured in short stints of time. Sometimes 1000’s of new species (that hapened to get fossilized) appeared in just a few thousand years. Granted, we are killing a lot of species off, but we are also cleaning out a whole bunch of niches for new species to grow into. It seems the conditions are ideal for that sort of growth.
Just curious: where did you take Bio 122, in which you were told that thousands of new species appeared in just a few thousand years?
(edit: got it. I didn’t know punctuated equilibrium worked that fast!)