Environmentalists Find Rare Bird on a Limb, Saw it Off

Biologists are on a mission: They're in Arkansas to kill some trees. The reason? To save a bird they thought was extinct. And unfortunately for the bird, regulators are close behind with their own brand of help.

You'll remember that recently the ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered after being "extinct" in the minds of ecologists for a half century. Scientists, juiced by the sighting, want to help the bird by killing trees because dead bark attracts a certain kind of beetle the bird loves to eat. By the way, they're using herbicides to kill the trees.

Even though the last sighting of this mega-flicker was in 1948, in Cuba, the federal government hedged by putting it on the endangered species list in case it ever resurrected. Now that it turns out the bird has survived all along without benefit of federal aid, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton is proposing to spend $10 million to develop a "recovery plan" for it. The bird can look forward to life among the regulated.

Notice just how crazy this is. As Washington pols debate the future of the Endangered Species Act, they might consider that nature's economy behaves like man's economy: Sometimes the less you mess with it, the better it works. The ivory-billed is the poster species for what the government might accomplish by leaving a rare animal alone.