Ecological trade-off: Conservationists kill trees to help rare woodpecker

Professur

Professur

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - In a sort of ecological trade-off, conservationists headed into the Arkansas woods Thursday to kill dozens of trees in hopes of helping the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that up until recently was feared extinct.

The woodpecker feasts on beetle larvae beneath the bark of dead trees. Killing trees by damaging the bark or administering herbicide could create more food for them and help the species recover.

"The goal really is to see if we can induce some kind of decrepitness in these trees, attract the insects and ultimately see if the woodpecker would use the trees," said Douglas Zollner, who works with The Nature Conservancy and is one of the project directors.

Zollner said the idea came even before scientists revealed in April that the woodpecker had been found living in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Arkansas. For more than half a century, the bird was thought to have been driven to extinction.

The plan calls for killing trees on four, 1 1/2-hectare plots where the woodpecker was sighted.

On Thursday, Mike Melnechuk with The Nature Conservancy travelled to the four plots of swampy forestland owned by the conservation group and the state to slowly kill some of the trees with herbicide. Melnechuk also planned to use a method called girdling, in which chain saws and axes are used cut the bark and cause the tree to die.

He planned to treat between 35 and 50 trees on each patch of land. There are between 2,000 and 2,800 trees on each plot.

The hope is that in about two or three years the trees will be dead or dying and hit their peak in beetle infestation.
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Is it just me, or does this have "Bad Idea" stamped all over it?
 
Just adding to the disaster.

TOKYO, Japan, August 4, 2005 (ENS) - Orbiting the Earth, astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery have been able to see widespread environmental destruction ...
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Environment News Service

I wonder what the modern ecological destruction looks like compared with that of 1543s space crews?
 
As long as they don't use poisons to kill the trees, it sounds like a sound ecological exchange. Not only good for the woodpecker but everything else that thrives around rotting wood.
 
You know, it seems like at some point, somebody, somewhere would say, "Hey, you've already fucked it up, what do you want to go in there and make it worse for?"
 
This bird survived, with no help at all, for the last 50 years. If they try to "help" now, they will wind up killing it. Again.

Why can't you just leave well enough alone? And how can they even be allowed to do that if it's protected land? It's being protected from us.
 
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