Introduction - Alabama and Mississippi - page 2

and Alabama, in particular, have done very little to protect the remaining wild places needed
for many species of birds to survive. Currently, huge tracts of hardwood forests in northern
Alabama are being logged and the wood is being cut into chips for shipment to Japan and
Korea. Millions of acres of prime songbird nesting habitat will be destroyed over the next
two decades, and the State of Alabama is doing nothing to prevent it; indeed, the govern-
ment is encouraging this destruction of forests, some of which have remained undisturbed for
a century or more. Birds such as American redstarts, ovenbirds, and many other woodland
warblers are in serious decline due to this loss of habitat, very little of which is preserved in
state and federal lands. Basically, the elected and appointed officials of these two states have
not taken the long-term view on protection of the environment. In 1991, Alabama was ranked
50th in the nation in protecting the environment by the 1991-92 Green Index, published by
the Southern Studies Institute; Mississippi was ranked 47th. Such lack of environmental pre-
servation makes the places that remain all the more precious. The small size of many of the
areas profiled here and the large distances between these birding spots show just how much
has already been lost. I hope that this topic will increase the public's knowledge of what we
still have in Alabama and Mississippi and that people will work to protect more of these two
special states.
ALABAMA
Alabama has an abundance of unique geologic regions and wildlife habitats; this is where
the Appalachian mountain range ends. Many birds have the very southern end of their sum-
mer nesting range in the mountains of northeastern Alabama; these include the black-throated
green warbler and the sharp-shinned hawk. According to a number of biologists, botanists,
and other scientists, the unique geology of Alabama gives the state a diversity of species un-
like any other in the nation. So little has been done on finding the species of animals, plants,
fish, and insects that live in Alabama that most of the species here have never been cataloged.
Some scientists theorize that, outside of the tropical rainforests of the world, Alabama has a
greater diversity of species than anywhere else on the planet. With Alabama being solidly in
the middle of the southern habitat of eastern birds, the state has great variety of bird species,
but it still does not compare to Texas; no state does. The Alabama Bird Records Committee
officially recognizes 403 species of birds as having occurred in Alabama. Most of the biolo-
gical diversity in Alabama is in those species who do not have the mobility of birds, such as
salamanders, mussels, turtles, insects, plants, and fish. Alabama has a rich avian fauna, but
for many other forms of life, Alabama is absolutely unique.
An excellent topic about birds in Alabama is available from The University of Alabama
Press; Alabama Birds, by Thomas A. Imhof, covers the life histories of bird species known
to occur in Alabama. That topic is not a guidebook to birding locations, but it does tell where
certain species have been spotted in the state. The main limitation of that topic is that it is