Clovers In The Atmosphere

so this article is ungodly long. it is about the unsuccessful search for the ivory-billed woodpecker and what that can teach us about birding culture, the power players of conservation ornithology, post-reconstruction mythology, and the power desire wields on the senses. Sufjan Stevens wrote a maudlin ballad to said woodpecker. This story is relevant to me in several ways. first, the editor of the Auk ( the best regarded ornithology journal in North America where the major refutation of the ivory-bill sighting was published), Spencer Sealy, works 4 doors down from me and is on my committee. And any article about birds is going to prompt some question from my grandparents about my opinion on it.

But more directly, the ivory-bill is interesting because it spans the grey area from naturalists to academics which is present in macrobiology in general and ornithology in particular. You don't have yurt-dwelling spiritualists and good old boys stepping forward to claim that they have discovered new elements or cancer geners like you do in this case. The accessibility of macrobiology is a big part of its beauty. Everyone has seen a bird. Everyone has been outside. Everyone has asked why the world works like it does.
The piece also touches on how science and conservation and relevant and communicated to the public, and how what makes a compelling public intellectual piece and what gets it done at an academic level rarely overlap. This notion of public science is directly applicable to me, because George, from the video clip, was also featured in an 8-page NYT mag article in 2000 which I read as a junior in college and was terribly inspired by, and had taped to my wall for a semester and a half. So although I am now an academic ornithologists, and am supposed to tut-tut these recreational birders, their anecdotal imaginations, and the excitable public, but I am chasing my own ivory-bill in Alaska every summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07woodpecker.html