In his Essay on Man and Other Poems, Alexander Pope wrote:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest. The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
This week the folks in Brinkley appear to have a little less spring in their collective hopes, at least where the Ivory-billed woodpecker is concerned. According to Rob Morritz, writing for the Arkansas News Bureau, the hunt for the elusive bird, long-thought extinct, has wound down. Back in 2005, a reported re-discovery once catapulted the quiet eastern Arkansas Delta town to prominence. Acting on a grainy video and 16 confirmed sightings of the bird thought extinct since the 1940s, researchers announced that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered in the woods near the Cache River and Bayou DeView north of Brinkley.
Purported glimpses of the bird let us hope that yet one more species hadn’t fallen to the sands of time. The people of Brinkley had more than romantic reasons to hope for the bird’s existence: money. Typical of the bird-driven windfall is Gene Depriest, owner of Gene’s Barbecue. He said the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker brought life to the town.
“For about four years we did real good,” he said, noting that his restaurant, the only one in town that did not sell fast food, was open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. and served as the gathering place for amateur birders, tourists and researchers and others who became regulars at the height of the woodpecker craze.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Depriest said his restaurant’s business rose about 25 percent, and he sold more than 20,000 T-shirts between 2005 and 2009.
Now that the ornithologists from Cornell and bird-watching tourists have become as scarce as the bird they once sought, and the sleepy town has returned to its former self. Only a few T-shirts and “woodpecker” haircuts are now sold. The bird boom has abated.
Like all “rushes” be they for gold, silver, oil or woodpeckers, this one ended as they inevitably do. In the particular case of the bird hunt gone asunder, it is especially regrettable. It is so because the motives behind the search were for something larger than money alone. Few among us romanticize the extinction of the Zion Jimmyweed, the Turgid Blossum mollusk or the Bay Springs salamander, but the Ivory-billed woodpecker is somehow different. By virtue of its apparent Lazarus act, we were given reason for hope anew. Admittedly, some of the evidence supporting the bird’s continued existence had the gravitas of a Bigfoot video, but at least it was something. It was something because it’s exactly the kind of story that speaks to the American experience. As generations of immigrants know, America is the place of the persistent second chance. Wherever you are, no matter what turmoil or terror your homeland has visited upon you, the Statue of Liberty still welcomes you and grants you one more chance.
Collectively, we hoped for the same consideration from the swampy waters of the Cache. We prayed that her cypress tress would open up to reveal life not yet extinguished, a feathery renaissance in black, white and red.
As it stands, those dreams seem just a bit more distant now, but as Pope wrote all those years ago, hope springs eternal in a proof of life yet to come.