Bachman’s Warbler once filled the canebrakes in Alabama.
Of the 10 mainland North American species declared extinct by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week, all but one were from Alabama.
The spirit bird of the Southeast, the ivory bill, once had its stronghold in Alabama pinelands and swamps. It was the tenor sax of the forest band. Its loss is deafening in all the forests where we work. You should try to imagine what it sounded like when you walk through the woods, just so you understand that no forest in Alabama will be the same without it.
Bachman’s warbler is just as heartbreaking. It followed in the steps of the Carolina parakeet and many other species that likely used or depended on native bamboo forests in the Southeast. Bamboo canebrake is one of Alabama’s most ignored landscapes – though many believe the very name Alabamu (the thicket gatherers) is a reference to how important canebrake once was to the people of the state. We should prioritize the restoration of canebrakes on the Alabama River and the Paint Rock River, where cane and species like Bachman’s warbler were once abundant.
The aquatic losses in Alabama continue to be stunning. Four mussels lost were part of the larger Mobile drainage in this state (including the flat pigtoe, a fact overlooked in recent press releases). It’s worth remembering that just a few decades ago, scientists assured that these species would go extinct if lock and dam systems were built on their rivers – but federal officials deliberately delayed listing them so that the dams could be built.
Three of the lost mussels were from the Tennessee River where it sweeps through Alabama between Paint Rock and Muscle Shoals, probably once the most species rich mussel beds in the world. Sixty percent of the nation’s mussel diversity, and almost 25% of global diversity, was crammed into Alabama, an area representing just 1 percent of the country’s land mass.
Maybe you’ll have an easy time forgetting they are gone forever if you see only their dead shells. But imagine their “flowers” – the lures and other devices these mussels used to attract fish to move young from one section of a river to another. It was a relationship as complex, as beautiful, as significant to the whole riverine ecosystem as the relationship between bees and flowers.
It’s increasingly difficult to give a full accounting of species lost to extinction in Alabama, but the number is now more than 100 in just the past two centuries. That’s far higher than any other mainland state. It’s a reflection both of the extraordinary diversity of the area, and of the extraordinary lack of concern for what happens to biodiversity here.
Amazingly, in Paint Rock and elsewhere in the state, we are still discovering new, and exceedingly rare, species that are likely found only in small areas of Alabama. It’s hard to know whether to be joyful or fearful when we find one. It will be decades before they are ever listed as endangered or threatened, given how deliberately cumbersome we’ve made the listing process. Our track record indicates that many are likely to go extinct in the meantime.
Only a massive new effort to protect the future of all Alabama species, those we know and the many we don’t know, will save one of the world’s most important storehouses of biodiversity.