Peckerwoods

Remember the bird watchers and hippies who are trooping around Arkansas forests and killing trees in an attempt to find an extinct woodpecker? They're back, and they're presenting the "evidence" that kicked off this whole deciduous death-hunt:

University of Arkansas researcher David Luneau accidentally kept a video camera running as his canoe drifted through a bayou in the Big Woods of Arkansas -- and recorded an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The video, blurry because the recorder was on auto focus, was the main piece of evidence featured online in an April 25 Science Express paper claiming the rediscovery of the woodpecker

If you read further into the article, you will find there is apparently a considerable body of skeptics who claim the video shows nothing of the kind--so the tree terrorizers produced further "evidence":

After analyzing more than 18,000 hours of recordings from the swampy forests of eastern Arkansas, researchers at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University have released recordings offering further evidence -- including the legendary bird's distinctive double knock -- for the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker

Again reading further into the article, we find that recording and analyzing 18,000 hours(!) of forest sounds (I get sleepy just thinking about it) produced less than one minute of what may be an extinct woodpecker.

Well, that was worth the effort, wasn't it?

These people's activities are roughly equivalent to walking through the forests of the Pacific Northwest and killing every deer you come across in the hopes that bigfoot likes rotting deer corpses--and then using the blurry and discredited Patterson video as a justification. Even if bigfoot exists, (which it doesn't, by the way; the hoaxers behind the footprints and the Patterson video confessed several years ago), you're still doing far more harm than any potential good.

I don't suppose it's even occurred to this ad hoc pack of over-enthusiastic, would-be Darwin defiers that perhaps the bird went extinct for a reason. Nature is constantly creating and extincting species; it's called natural selection. I would've hoped that a group of bio-scientists would understand this principle. Unfortunately, it appears as though ignorance (or disregard) of the scientific method and its guiding principles is approaching a disturbing level of normality, even among people who claim to be scientists.

By trying to artificially preserve this animal, these well-meaning but misguided bird watchers are interfering with the natural selection of species. They are in effect playing god. Humanity has only just begun to comprehend the mechanics of Darwinism and natural selection; monkeying about with it at random (if you'll pardon the pun) is not a good idea, under any circumstances. In the simpler--but no less true--words of my dear-departed Papaw: "If you don't understand it, don't go messin' with it. You'll probably just get yourself hurt."