Last year, the headlines read, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Found in Arkansas.” Scientists smiled and birders cheered. The largest woodpecker in North America, thought to be extinct for over 60 years, is perhaps preserved in one small place in the big woods of Arkansas, giving us a chance to see what some call the “Lord God bird.”
As I prepared to join four other biologists from the Vermont Institute of Natural Science on an expedition to search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, I stopped and thought about which birds have disappeared from New Hampshire and Vermont since the first Europeans traveled the rivers and lakes of the region. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons, wild turkeys, and passenger pigeons all came quickly to mind.
The passenger pigeon is perhaps the most poignant reminder of how indescribable abundance can disappear in just one generation of humanity. The species’ last representative, named Martha, died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.
Vermont naturalist Samuel Williams wrote in 1794 that one of the earliest settlers in the Rutland region said, “The number of pigeons was immense. Twenty-five nests were frequently to be found on one beech tree. For an hundred acres together, the ground was covered with their dung, to the depth of two inches. Their noise in the evening was extremely troublesome, and so great that the traveler could not get any sleep, where their nests were thick. About an hour after sunrise, they rose in such numbers as to darken the air.”
Williams continued, “When the young pigeons were grown to a considerable bigness, before they could readily fly, it was common for the settlers to cut down the trees, and gather a horse load [of birds] in a few minutes. The settlement of the country has since set bounds to this luxuriancy of animal life; diminished the number of these birds; and drove them further to the northward.”
The only place the passenger pigeon can now be found in northern New England is at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where two pairs are preserved behind glass.
But with this sad tale of birds lost, we find hope and pride for other birds we have brought back home. The turkey, the eagle, and the falcon are once again breeding in northern New England.
The last native wild turkeys to strut hereabouts were in the mid-1800s, thanks to unregulated hunting and intensive forest clearing. The genes of that New England population are lost forever, but the wild turkeys that now reside in the twin states represent one of our greatest conservation success stories.
In 1969, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife obtained 17 wild turkeys from southwestern New York and released them in Pawlet. The following year, 14 more wild turkeys were released in Hubbardton. Between 1972 and 1982, birds were trapped and moved around the state to expand their range. With constant monitoring and management, the population today, which is actively hunted, has expanded to over 40,000 birds. New Hampshire’s story echoes this achievement.
Like those of many raptors, peregrine falcon and bald eagle populations were nearly destroyed by the chemical DDT in the years following World War II. In 1972, DDT was banned in the United States, allowing a slow recovery in bird populations that continues today.
The Peregrine Fund initiated an intensive captive breeding and release (called “hacking”) program in 1975 and successfully reestablished the peregrine to the eastern U.S. In Vermont, 93 young birds were released at 3 hack sites between 1982 and 1987. In 1985 a pair returned to the long vacant Mt. Pisgah aerie and raised three young. New England’s breeding population has increased steadily and now includes more than a dozen pair in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and the region’s only urban pair, on a building in downtown Manchester.
Bald eagles were once very common birds in North America. Experts estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 bald eagles inhabited the lower 48 states in the early 1700s. By 1950, eagles were no longer nesting in New Hampshire, and in the 1960s, fewer than 100 bald eagles nested in the entire Northeast. In 1967, however, bald eagles were protected under the Endangered Species Act and began their slow return. The majestic birds returned to New Hampshire’s Lake Umbagog in 1988, reoccupying a nesting site that had been vacant since 1949. Until recently, Vermont was the only northeastern state without breeding eagles, but now, with several nests and territorial pairs in the Connecticut River valley, bald eagles are back.
With this handful of conservation success stories in mind, we venture out to Arkansas to search for the Lord God bird. Is it gone forever like the passenger pigeon? Or can we return it to glory like the bald eagle?