A Pervasive Presence

From the Editor

The last three months have seen a rather startling number of news stories about wildlife species showing up where they weren’t expected. In June, biologists announced a breeding pair of least Bell’s vireos had been spotted in California’s Central Valley, likely the first such pair there in 40 years. The Central Valley’s riparian forest habitat is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the US, with more than 90 percent of its original acreage now converted to agriculture and suburbs. The vireos were found in an area that had been restored by CalFed, a federal-state consortium. Conservationists are thrilled at the news, and rightly so.

Other species making the papers prompted less of a “wow” than a “whew.” The Mount Diablo buckwheat and the California dissanthelium, both thought extinct until very recently, made a surprise appearance in the wake of an extremely wet winter on the Pacific Coast. The buckwheat grows on its namesake mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area within a protected state park. It had not been seen in the wild since 1936. The dissanthelium, a short bunchgrass thought extinct since 1912, was found in a recently burned section of Santa Catalina Island, near Los Angeles. Ephemeral annual plants often live only as dormant seeds beneath the surface of the soil, waiting for the right climate conditions for germination. If the land on which these two species reappeared had not been preserved, that seedbank might have been destroyed with no one the wiser.

Those two plants suffered what you might term a “close call.” Two other species made the news to general acclaim, but that appearance isn’t actually good news.

The highland mangabey, the first new primate species found in Africa since 1984, lives in the dense Ndundulu Forest in Tanzania at around 8,000 feet in elevation. (Its discovery was one of those destined to be adorned with an asterisk in the record books; local Tanzanians had known of the species for some time.) Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Georgia, and Conservation International describe the monkey as about three feet long with brown fur and black face and hands. It was discovered during research into the condition of a closely related species, the critically endangered Sanje mangabey.

And then there’s the ivory-billed woodpecker, rediscovered in 2004 in the cypress swamps of Arkansas, to intense media attention after the story was released in 2005. The “Lord God Bird,” so-nicknamed for the oath people once used when spying the impressive woodpecker, had been thought extinct in the US since the last sighting of the species in the wild in 1944, and possibly altogether since the last Cuban sighting in the late 1980s.

Despite our overwhelming impact on the planet, there are still places where our eyes and ears don’t reach. In the 20th century, we lamented the lack of unexplored landscapes. In the 21st, we begin to lament the lack of landscapes that have not been inventoried. While there were only three or four billion of us, there were places where animals and plants could live their lives without human interference, without human awareness. Now tourists plan trips to see the ivory-bill before it succumbs. The noose draws tighter.

I’’m thrilled that ivory-bills still live in the Arkansas woods. But I mourn the loss of a planet on which a “Lord God Bird” might fly through the swamp without us knowing about it.