Save the (Fill in the blank)

I feel so much better now knowing that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct. First, I never knew it was extinct, nor did I particularly care – my life has been totally fulfilled without knowledge of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

It does bother me greatly that the Interior Secretary of the United States is pledging $10 million to improve the habitat for the ivory-billed woodpecker. Last time I heard, the U.S. was running a huge deficit, so we must borrow money to help the ivory-billed woodpecker which we thought was extinct.

Here in San Diego we have spent millions of dollars keeping the California condor from going extinct, and many millions more protecting the habitat of the lease tern, whatever that is. I can say without discomfort that the extinction of any or all of those species would cause me not a second of lost sleep.

I have no idea how many species have ‘gone missing’ as the modern term describes it, but I am happy as a clam that the tyrannosaurus no longer roams the landscape of North County, and I wish for the rapid demise of the mosquito as well. No doubt the World Wildlife Federation will disagree with my feelings, but they are mine, and well defined they are.

The World Wildlife Federation describes the finding of the ivory-billed woodpecker as finding "The Holy Grail" because the bird has been presumed extinct for 60 years.

Some of you may recall the stories a few decades ago about the discovery of a Jurassic-era fish, the coelacanth, which was thought to have been extinct for 65 million years! The discovery of first a dead fish, "most important zoological find of the century," and eventually a live one, was a far more important find than the ivory-billed woodpecker.

I thought that the coelacanth was really something, or at least I thought enough to have remembered it decades later for this column. Neither its extinction 65 million years ago nor its discovery off East London in South Africa in 1938 have caused me, or anyone outside the scientific community, to have any changes in our lives. Even when the first live coelacanth was found in 1952 – and that is the event I recalled – my life was not changed.

At least, to the best of my knowledge, the French who controlled the Comoran Islands which are the breeding grounds for the "dinosaur fish" nor the British who actually captured them, ever proposed spending $10 million of the taxpayers money in furthering the species!

We have a nation running a deficit, a State running a deficit and a City running a deficit – and all three do not seem capable of prioritizing their expenses. The country wants to spend AT LEAST $10 million on the ivory-billed woodpecker, the State supports the California condor, and the City funds the lease tern.

If that was the only waste that government did, perhaps the taxpayers could live with it – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of "endangered" and indeed non-endangered species that have come under the welfare payments of various levels of governments, not to mention the private and public construction around the country being delayed, re-routed, or completely held hostage by some actual or presumed "endangered species."

The mind boggles!