Air Date: Week of March 15, 2002

This week, we dip into the Living on Earth mailbag to hear what listeners have to say.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood. And coming up, we'll meet a guy who finds poetry behind the wheel of a snowplow. But first -

[THEME MUSIC]

CURWOOD: Time for comments from our listeners. Stephen Chalmers, who hears us on WQCS in Ft. Pierce, Florida, spoke for many listeners when he left this message on our comment line: "I just wanted to thank you all for giving us the Ivory-billed Woodpecker stories. I certainly appreciated being able to hear the tapes from the '30's that Tanner left for us. Thank you very much. Bye."

From Pasadena, California, KPCC-listener Terry Lilly wrote to say the Ivory-billed Woodpecker stories riveted him to his car radio in the supermarket parking lot. "The transfixing call of the Ivory-bill brought tears down my cheeks," he wrote. "What a gift that recording is. The drivers on either side of me were not leaving their cars. I could see that they were visibly moved, but by what? Later I saw both drivers in the checkout line and I softly said two words to them: "Ivory-bill." And they replied in unison, "How did you know?"

David Greenberg hears us on WNPR in Stamford, Connecticut. He had an idea to pass on to John Fitzpatrick, the ornithologist from Cornell who described recording 6,000 hours of possible Ivory-billed Woodpecker habitat. "You joked that the listening task would fall upon some poor grad student," he writes. "The professor mentioned a computer program designed to locate the areas on the recording that deserve closer scrutiny and implied that only those clips will be listened to by human ears and the brain in-between them. I have an idea. Why not solicit interested listeners or birdwatchers to take on some number of hours? I could imagine a website on which interested parties could simply grab chunks of time to download as they go, logging which time frames they've completed. I'd be happy to take on a share or two."

[SOUND OF IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER]

To make us happy, you can call our listener line any time: 800-218-9988. Or write to us at 8 Story Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02138. Our e-mail address is letters@loe.org. And visit our webpage at www.loe.org.

[THEME MUSIC OUT]