Jukebox In My Head

After reading the four books on the long-thought-extinct bird, I admit to being smitten by the ivory-billed woodpecker, once our country's largest pecker and known by many who saw it as the Lord God Bird.

The sad story of the ivory bill's slide into extinction is a distasteful tale that dates to humans' first contact. The birds' colorful, characteristic plumage and eggs were plundered by Native Americans and early explorers for trinkets and food. But it was pure human greed (this time for wood) and industrial-age weapons of mass destruction that clear-cut the swamps of the Southeastern United States. The ivory bill was lost along with one of the largest forests on the planet. If you have an old Singer sewing machine from the early 1920s in the attic, the wood in it was part of that senseless destruction. To add insult to injury, ornithologists killed the last ivory bill colonies for their own collections, crying crocodile tears at its demise while mounting their iconic specimens for a waiting laboratory drawer.

Though sightings have been sporadically reported since the 1940s, the ornithologist community stopped taking any seriously. Then in 2004, two birders, one an editor at the prestigious Cornell School of Ornithology doing a book on ivory bills, following a tip, spotted what they determined was an ivory bill in Arkansas. A short film taken from a boat in the same area a couple of months later led Cornell to recognize the finds as authentic. After a period of euphoria, many in the birding community began questioning the official Cornell video findings. Today, after three years of fruitless, expensive searches, there is serious skepticism that the Arkansas sightings are really proof of the ivory bills' escape from the noose of extinction.

Now, Geoff Hill, an ornithologist at Auburn University, enters the fray with a new book, Ivorybill Hunters: The Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness. Hill and several of his graduate students spent several months in a western-Florida swampland and came back with photos of woodpecker bark scaling and recordings of bird calls and woodpecking in the remote swamps of the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida panhandle near the Georgia border. Some team members recorded multiple sightings of what they identified as ivory bills. They came back, however, with no photos, just two blurry videos that, even Hill admits, are inconclusive.

When I first read of Hill's low-budget study on the website, I didn't put much faith in it, especially after reading some of the web posts by those involved. I'm not sure I believe him after reading the book, but that said, he makes a good argument for further research into the area where they made their discoveries.

Hill, an academic ornithologist and lifetime birder, draws a careful distinction between the two to criticize the science behind Cornell's analysis of the Arkansas sighting and video and build the case for his own study.

It's unfortunate that they didn't get a clear shot; in fact, no researcher ever reported observing a perched bird. The photos of the wood shavings are most intriguing, showing patterns of ivory-bill beakwork. I am less enthusiastic about the recordings they made of the bird's distinctive kent call or the double-knock rapping sound on the web, but that could be because there aren't enough authentic ivory-bill recordings to match them up against. Hill concedes that his study won't pass scientific scrutiny.

I find no reason to disbelieve Hill's sincerity or his confidence in his evidence. If anything, he has too much faith in his own team. But he makes a good case that many western-Florida river systems haven't been explored, few humans enter those waters and most folks wouldn't recognize an ivory bill if they saw it – pileated woodpeckers are plentiful and often mistaken for ivory bills. Jerome Jackson, the noted ivory-bill author and researcher who is among those who question the Arkansas findings, wrote in his book that he believed the Florida swamps might still harbor isolated groups of ivory bills.

That is perhaps encouraging. I once felt it was important to find out if these birds are truly extinct. But remembering our lethal history, I think that we should just let them be, in their isolated swamps, far from our deadly grasp.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today was the annual 4/20 Pot Smoke-Out at Farrand Field. This year it got preempted by a real fire in West Boulder. Billie and I were running errands and driving around town when we ran into our old friends Charlie and Janice, who live at Fourth and Pearl streets. We parked and were catching up, when we began noticing the smell of smoke. It was about 2:30.

Somebody must be burning leaves, I thought, and looked to the west. Everybody thought that, too, but within just a couple of minutes, we saw puffs of smoke coming over the ridge of the Red Rocks foothill above Settler's Park. We had just driven east on Canyon, turned onto Pearl at Settler's Park and noticed nothing ten minutes earlier.

The puffs were becoming more intense, and soon smoke spread out over us heading east. I got out the iPhone and started taking pictures at 2:36. Though it is in the 70s, it has been a gusty, windy day. I was finally driven back home on a bike ride by heavy gusts in south Boulder earlier. You could see the gusts blowing the fire higher up toward the ridge.

I'm looking at Google Earth images of the area, and I'm guessing that the fire began in a huge grove of trees above Settler's Park and just a little east of the two buildings west of the park. Perhaps along one of the trails that go up to the Red Rocks formation from Settler's Park.

We moved to the corner of Fourth and Pearl, where we got a better view. The smoke became orange colored as the gusts continued. Finally, we could see flames at the foot of the pine trees at the top of the ridge east of the Red Rocks formations.

There are homes at the bottom of the east side of Red Rocks hill, and there is an old orchard-turned condos east of the Silver Lake Ditch, which winds around the east side of the hill.

It hasn't been ten minutes, but people are biking, walking and driving down Pearl Street. For every person leaving the area, there are cars, bikes and people heading toward the area. I'm guessing this is due to the ubiquity of cell phones: "Dude, I'm on the roof of the Foundry, and fire is shooting out of the foothills").

By the time we got home, we could see smoke from Martin Acres.

Here's the update. No really bad news this time.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

News organizations are under fire these days. I find myself sticking up for my former occupation, especially for those toiling in the fires, the reporters and editors who are out there on the line doing the stories.

But it isn't difficult to see why people are fed up and looking to other sources for news, too. The Smoking Gun, a website that publishes public documents not found elsewhere, recently caught The Los Angeles Times publishing a bombshell story based on forged documents. And just this week it looked into the history of Akon, a rapper who has peddled stories about growing up gangster to reporters for years, and found that his tales were lies and exaggerations. Read my entire rant at my other blog, NewsGator Daily News.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm taking out the trash Friday morning, stepping out the front door a few minutes before seven. A couple of ravens or crows (I couldn't tell) flew right over my head heading south. They rose as I watched them move away, their wings silently floating across the Moyers' yard.

I walked off the porch, still watching the birds, who were settling into a tall tree fifty feet away, three front-yards over. That's when I noticed the visitors. Two birds about four or five times the size of the ravens perched on the same branch.

Turkey vultures. I had seen ten of them circling above the CU property south of town Tuesday morning while walking up to the bus stop. The vultures are a part of the springtime experience in Boulder and other areas along the Front Range at this time of year.

I grabbed the binoculars and headed up the street, where I finally got a view of what turned out to be seven vultures in the tree. One seemed to be lying on the limb rather than standing. They were about forty or fifty feet from the ground.

Went back to get Billie, and there we both were, in our jammies, running up the street for the cheapest of thrills. A neighbor bringing out her trash saw us, and looked a bit askance at our attire. I pointed up to the birds. She knew them from living in Ontario. Not exactly fashionable-looking birds, we agreed. But magnificent nonetheless.

Took a shower, and I heard the sounds of our trash hauler coming down the street, sounding like a combat battalion, metal against metal. I ran back out after the truck passed, and though a couple had changed positions, all seven were still there. I saw one flapping huge wings circling for another perch.

I walked beneath them on the way to the bus stop and then caught a last glimpse as the bus took off on Table Mesa. I wondered how many times I had walked beneath them and never even knew they were there.

I was up early Saturday again, but no vultures. Kept watching all weekend, but they never came back. A temporary roost.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you ever needed confirmation about how quickly things are changing in the music industry, you need look no farther than an article written by music critic Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times about the Raconteurs’ decision to release its new album, Consolers of the Lonely, to everybody, including music critics, on the same day. This follows similar strategies by Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead that, in essence, eliminate the critic from the initial discussion of a CD.

Not surprisingly, this has caused some consternation amongst those who write about music professionally. One of the hallmarks of the rock era (at least up until now) is that critics get CDs early so their reviews can appear on or before the day of release. Some writers fear that this will somehow surrender a valuable source of marketing for releases.

What a load. And I say this as someone who wrote professionally about music for a quarter century. It was hard to imagine that our readers took us critics seriously fifteen years ago; to imagine they do so today is laughable. We find out about new music now through friends, blogs, B2B networks, ripped CDs, television commercials, Rhapsody, XM, mp3s, MySpace and yes, perhaps sometimes from critics. But consider that when you buy a CD at Amazon.com, it offers you other, similar titles to the one you just added to your virtual shopping cart. The critic has been replaced with an algorithm. Ouch.

During the blockbuster era, new releases would sell millions of copies during its first week of release amidst a blitz of hype from advertising and reviews. Critics' reviews were cogs in that concentrated marketing drive. Musicians, no longer dependent on that first week’s sales, marketing and press hype, hardly need to suck up to critics anymore.

I always disliked the old approach. Faced with reviewing an album in two days, you listen, hoping to find something to write about, any hook to hang a review upon. Quite often, that first review doesn’t really express how you feel about an album once you have lived with it for a couple of weeks and let the songs come to you on their own terms, not as a deadline. It isn't really helpful or even say how you really feel, but there it is.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for good criticism and considered commentary. But a review should be a beginning point for a discussion, not the final word on the subject. Wouldn’t you rather read a review after you have listened to an album and formed an opinion rather than read it to find out if your favorite critic liked it or not? Who really cares? Powers, a good critic, appreciates this, remembering how many times she has deemed an album a reject before she really had the chance to live with it.

Andrew Sarris, a New York film reviewer who wrote many years for the Village Voice and now for the New York Observer, always suggested reading his reviews after you saw the picture, not before. That way, the reader has the same context and, hopefully, a conversation begins.

Truth is, as music is becoming more decentralized, I have more conversations with more people about music than anytime in my life, including my rockcritter days. Today we're all critics, and we are all the better for it.

Posted by Leland Rucker at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)