The View from Sapsucker Woods

By John W. Fitzpatrick

Several heroes of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker's rediscovery are now familiar names. You'll read about the contributions of Gene Sparling, Tim Gallagher, Bobby Harrison, David Luneau, and others in this issue of BirdScope. Although they richly deserve their current limelight, some earlier heroes deserve every bit of the same public honor. The amazing discovery would never have happened but for the farsighted and courageous actions of some proud Arkansans over the past half-century. Indeed, Arkansas today is a place where natural resources are cherished as state treasures, and where members of all political cloths have invested energy and even risked their careers to conserve and restore that state's superb natural areas.

In many respects the "Aldo Leopold" of twentieth-century Arkansas was wildlife biologist-canoeist-hunter Harold Alexander, of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Alexander's innovative thinking and passionate essays about stream and wetlands protection penetrated the public mindset long before clean water became a conservation mainstay. He helped pioneer the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, a group that would later play a huge role in the protection of the Cache River and White River forest ecosystems.

Illustration by John W. Fitzpatrick

The mid-1900s was the "age of channelization" across the United States, and Arkansas was by no means exempt from attention and investment by the powerful U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A plan to convert 232 miles of the nearly pristine Cache River ecosystem into a sterile ditch was becoming a reality in the early 1970s when Pratt Remmel, Jr., and Tom Foti (founders of the Arkansas Ecology Center) vehemently protested its inadequate attention to the fledgling National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). The Cache River was defended in an early court test of NEPA by Richard Arnold and Johnnie Moore, the latter a sportsman attorney from Clarendon who was moved to battle after waking up to the clanging of draglines channelizing his favorite waters. Aided by the Environmental Defense Fund, their arguments between 1971 and 1976 led to the historic ruling that NEPA requires "full disclosure" of environmental impacts. The court case bought time for Rex Hancock, a sport-hunting dentist from Stuttgart, to launch a monumental public campaign against the channelization project. Hancock mobilized a national coalition of duck hunters and environmentalists, ultimately convincing the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (and wildlife agencies from eight other states) to oppose the ditching project.

Efforts to protect these great swamp forests were galvanized by Kay Kelly Arnold and Nancy Delamar, the first two directors of The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas. Fostered by governor-turned-senator Dale Bumpers, their work was rewarded with expansion of the White River National Wildlife Refuge and, in 1986, creation of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. Both refuges have continued to expand, and today their combined area protects more than 220,000 acres of swamp and bottomland hardwood forests. Contiguous state and private refuges bring the protected forest area to more than 320,000 acres, and further additions are likely over the coming years. A thousand square miles of this great forest ecosystem might one day be protected.

Eastern Arkansas bears witness to the fact that committed individuals can leave their mark in saving great natural areas, even when powerful forces are lined up against them. Much of the early energy for saving these swamps came from hunters, who too rarely receive the credit they are due for conservation successes. May all of us who celebrate the tenuous persistence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker tip our hats to the many heroes who worked to keep its woods intact.

--John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu