Arkansas towns see salvation in rediscovered woodpecker

CLARENDON, Ark. — About one-quarter of the downtown shops are boarded up. The two factories — a steel-basket manufacturer and a shoe company — fled for Mexico about four years ago. Many children leave town after graduation.

But there suddenly is hope, talk of new motels being built, and a flock of newly printed T-shirts for sale. And the children, at least the younger ones, are showing civic pride with a strange, multicolored, moussed-up $25 "woodpecker haircut."

And it's all thanks to a bird.

Not any bird, mind you, but an ivory-billed woodpecker, thought for 60 years to be extinct. But in the Arkansas Big Woods region, it is alive again.

Clarendon — population 1,751 and shrinking every census — and all of Monroe County, which in January 2004 had a double-digit unemployment rate, now hopes to copy the ivory-bill and rise from what everyone said was a certain death.

"This might be the thing that gets us going," Clarendon Mayor Don Boshers said yesterday morning during a birding festival that attracted 2,000 people to the town square along the banks of the White River.

Yet, the very bird tourism that this area embraces could end up crushing the ivory-bill's habitat and send it fleeing or worse. Parts of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge quickly were closed to anyone but a select dozen scientists with special research passes. Interior Secretary Gale Norton asked people not to come. Officials went on bird-watching Web sites to say stay away.

"We were afraid that literally 20,000 birders were going to descend on central Arkansas and love this bird to death," U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regional director Sam Hamilton told a town-hall meeting in Stuttgart on Thursday.

After a month of worry and a mere trickle of tourists — mostly because summer is a bad time to visit to look for birds, due to heat, mosquitoes, snakes and a thick tree canopy that's hard to see through — officials are breathing a little easier. They opened some of the restricted areas last week.

"We don't expect summer to be that bad," Hamilton said.

By fall and winter, when birders are expected to arrive in earnest, new visitor towers, boardwalks and stands may be ready. Still, the chances of seeing an ivory-bill are slim, based on the fact that researchers made seven sightings during 20,000 hours of looking.

Because the Big Woods — an area that includes both the White River and Cache River national wildlife refuges — is so thick with towering trees, swamps, bayous, rivers and lakes, it can accommodate a lot of people.

The notoriously skittish ivory-bill likely would not notice the birders, officials and conservationists hope.

"There is so much space for both the bird and the people who want to come, look at it, that we're really very fortunate," said Scott Simon, Arkansas director of The Nature Conservancy, which helped coordinate the woodpecker search and bought new land around the refuges to expand the habitat. "There must be something going right in this ecosystem, because this bird has been here for decades with all these other people."

The man who started it all, bird rediscoverer Gene Sparling, who has been coordinating search teams, figures tourism and the ivory-bill will live well together.

"I expect great numbers of people to come," Sparling said. "I actually expect it to be a wonderful thing."

So do all the towns in the area. In a way, they all have competing claims to the woodpecker.

County seat Clarendon, the junction of the two wildlife refuges the ivory-bill roams through, figures it's the logical place to visit, especially since it hosts the birding festival. Bigger Brinkley, even closer to the "hot zone" where the bird actually was found, claims to be the home of the woodpecker — and it has chain motels and restaurants, unlike its neighbors. St. Charles is the home of a new visitor's center at the White River National Wildlife Refuge that was finished a day after the rediscovery was announced.