In old-timey detective stories, the Bad Guy character would snarl “I smell a rat” when he sensed that something was not right. Maybe there was a hint of scam, or a trap being laid, or a double-cross afoot.
Well, people are starting to “smell a rat” in the sudden appearance of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker in Arkansas.
If this sounds familiar, it is. The same ploy has been used successfully over and over again by environmental organizations and government wildlife agencies that seek to close land to human use, and to transfer ownership title of the land and control of the land to the government.
Remember the Spotted Owl fiasco in the Northwest. Green groups found co-conspirators in federal wildlife agencies and in the courts, had the Spotted Owl declared ‘Endangered,’ and closed huge areas of northwestern forests to logging, mining, recreation and most other uses, by claiming that the owl absolutely required Old Growth Forest for survival. Years later, it was determined that the owl, in fact, is not and never was ‘endangered', did NOT require Old Growth Forest, lived happily in re-grown logged forests and even in a K-Mart sign at a shopping center.
By that time, damage done by environmentalists in the name of ‘saving’ the Spotted Owl had ruined the regional economy, caused an avalanche of business bankruptcies, destroyed rural tax bases, and financially triggered a soaring divorce rate. This is the likely future of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker forests and farms in Arkansas. Environmentalists and their allies in federal and state government were never called upon to apologize and were never sent to jail or required to pay restitution to their multitude of victims.
Building on the success of ‘endangered species’ to stop land use, some environmentalists went the extra mile and planted evidence of ‘endangered species’ presence where the species do not exist, for the purpose of shutting down land use.
Government wildlife biologists in Oregon planted, and then ’discovered’ and reported, lynx hairs in a forest they wanted closed to all human activity except their own. Fortunately, the biologists were caught. Laboratory analysis showed that some of the hairs were from a stuffed lynx and other hairs came from a captive lynx. Recently in California, thirty specimens of an ‘endangered’ plant, the Sebastopol meadow foam, were determined to have been transplanted to stop housing construction at the Laguna Vista subdivision in Sebastopol. Environmentalists were trying to stop the construction project because of a nearby wetland. Criminal investigation into the matter is presently ongoing.
Environmental organizations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are drafting new regulations concerning the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in Minnesota. The new regulations will close many areas traditionally open to hunting, fishing and recreation, and place burdensome restrictions on the use of still more areas within the Refuge. It’s part of the longstanding pattern of slowly regulating people out of large land and water areas that are to be ‘returned to Nature.’ This ’rewilding’ is demanded by The Wildlands Project which seeks to entirely eliminate people from 50% of North America and to place the few remaining people in the other 50% of North America under tight federal and United Nations control.
There is a 4,300-acres Refuge, similar to the Minnesota refuge, which was created in the year 2000 on four former islands now connected with nearby land, along a 60-miles section of the Mississippi River south of St. Louis, Missouri. The Middle Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge website mentions the desire to acquire an additional 14,000 acres to expand the Refuge.
The Middle Mississippi River Partnership also has grander plans, and proposes in its May 2005 Vision Plan to eventually control land use and to create new fish and wildlife refuges on 546,030 acres of productive, privately owned farm land along the Mississippi river floodplain between St. Louis, Missouri, and Cairo, Illinois. Partnership members include federal and state wildlife agencies, hunting organizations, environmental organizations, and Southern Illinois University.
Government agencies and environmental organizations have a strong track record of promising wonderful environmental and economic benefits if only people will accept a refuge for some ‘endangered’ plant or animal, and then regulating people out of all beneficial use of the land once the refuge is established. The land is taken from its owners but promised benefits to local people never appear. Economies and communities -- human habitat -- are destroyed.
Enter, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, which has had no other documented sightings in the United States since the year 1946, 59 years ago.
People living in the town of Cotton Plant near the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, midway between Little Rock and Memphis, are all a-twitter over sightings of the Ivory-Bill and hope to receive instant wealth from eco-tourism and flocks of birders expected to sweep into town to catch a glimpse of the rare bird.
But is the sudden appearance of an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker after 59 years of absence a blessing from Nature or another private land theft eco-swindle organized by Gang Green environmental organizations and money-hungry government wildlife agencies?
I smell a rat.
There is simply too much coincidence between the push to create and expand local wildlife refuges, including huge expansion of the new Middle Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge which will eventually run people off hundreds of thousands of acres of productive, privately owned, river floodplain land, and the miraculous and timely reappearance in Arkansas’ nearby Cache River National Wildlife Refuge of a bird extirpated from the United States for more than half a century.
Swamps, woodlands and fields of eastern Arkansas are, and have been, crawling with wildlife people since long before the last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker vanished. The farms and woodlands are populated with resident folks and visiting hunters. Are we to believe that, in fifty nine years, Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers lived in the forest and hid so successfully that nobody saw, heard, or reported their presence, saw abandoned nests, or found a dead one dragged in by the cat?
The woodpecker has a striking appearance, a black body with a white patch on the back, and a red head crest. It is a big bird, and makes a loud, two-part sound as it pecks wood: BAM-bam, BAM-bam, BAM-bam.
Does anyone really believe that a big black-and-white red-headed bird flying around the woods for fifty nine years and hammering on trees with a distinctive sound would not be noticed and reported by someone, or more likely by hundreds of someones, particularly by bird watchers and bird scientists for whom the discovery would be a feather in their professional cap?
It is far more likely that the bird really was gone from the Arkansas woods all that time, and was reintroduced by Gang Green environmental activists or government wildlife agents so that it could be ‘discovered’ in March, 2005, just in time to become another ‘endangered species’ tool for condemnation and unconstitutional conversion of private property to federal government ownership and United Nations land control along the banks of the Mississippi River.
I smell a rat.
Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers are not extinct. They still live in the mountains of Cuba. Did someone trap specimens in Cuba and then transport the birds to eastern Arkansas for release in the big forested swamp that is now coming under ownership attack by government agencies and Gang Green environmental organizations? What better tool for those who want to flush out all those hideous, polluting humans, to restore Gaia’s Glorious Wilderness and advance The Wildlands Project!
The ’endangered’ woodpecker is potentially a giant land condemnation tool, as the original range of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker covered 50 million acres of southern forest extending eastward from Arkansas through Florida. Five million acres of that forest, coveted by environmentalists, remain today. Potentially affected states lie within a huge rectangle, starting in Missouri and including all states southward to Texas, all states from Missouri eastward to North Carolina, and extending all the way to the Atlantic ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
“Millions of acres” will be demanded by Gang Green environmental organizations to ‘save the woodpecker.’ Farms will be shut down, roads closed and destroyed, timber lands condemned, business bankrupted, local tax bases destroyed, hunting and fishing ended, and immense areas of land placed ‘off limits’ to human use as demanded by The Wildlands Project. Universities will get millions of dollars in wildlife grants to study the bird, and state and federal wildlife agencies and environmental organizations will get huge increases in grants, funding, and personnel. Already, $10,500,000 has been committed for land acquisition to expand Ivory-Billed woodpecker refuge. Five thousand acres of the Cache River Refuge have been closed to public use.
It all fits together too well, and too conveniently. The sudden reappearance of the Ivory-Billed woodpecker in eastern Arkansas is not a wildlife recovery matter, it is a matter for criminal investigation by the Attorneys General of Arkansas and all adjacent states. This smells and looks like another Gang Green land-grab ripoff of gigantic size and scope, coupled with illegal international trapping, transportation and release of an ‘endangered' bird.
Too many people, environmental organizations and government agencies stand to profit, and too many citizens stand to lose their land and livelihood, and too many rural areas stand to lose their economy and tax base, as federal and state wildlife agencies and Gang Green wildlife organizations force unwilling landowners to become ‘willing sellers’ of their land.
Rush Limbaugh is right when he says, “The environmental movement is the modern home of the Communist Party in America.” One of the Communist Party’s longstanding goals is transfer of all land and natural resources from private ownership and use to government ownership and control, as The Wildlands Project demands.
The recent Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, Connecticut, empowering government to compete with its own citizens through eminent domain condemnation of one person’s land for purchase and business use by another person, could be used to condemn and acquire thousands of acres of farms and woods by anyone, including tax-exempt not-for-profit Gang Green environmental organizations that might propose to build a woodpecker watchers resort. The woodpecker resort would never actually have to be built. The newly vacant land could then be sold to a speculator at a large profit and would not have to be returned to its former owners.
I smell rats, rats, rats everywhere. Their stench is strong in the forests of eastern Arkansas.
William Jud
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