Campephilus p. principalis (Ivory-billed Woodpecker)

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Experts Disagree About Woodpecker Sighting

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

You’ve probably seen them: those few seconds of grainy, blurry videotape out in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge showing what was believed to be the ivory-billed woodpecker taking off in flight.

The videotape did ignite a multi-million dollar search. The bird, believed to be extinct for decades, was captured on video by UALR Electronics and Computers Associate Professor, David Luneau.

Luneau admits, “It's not a great video, I’ll be the first to tell you that."

Luneau, who is a bird enthusiast, recalls the day, “As we were coming up the channel and turning into the woods, we were about to turn off the channel and I had a trolling motor running and turned it off and I reached over to pick up a paddle and the bird flew off the tree."

Even Luneau wasn't convinced at first. After careful examination of the video and scientific research based on size, color pattern and the bird in flight, he released his findings.

Luneau says, “We've done a full re-enactment with models and everything and it matches the ivory-bill model."

However, some scientists remain unconvinced.

"That is their primary evidence and yet that evidence doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny,” says Jerome Jackson.

Jackson is an ornithologist and ivory bill specialist from Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers, Fl.

He feels too much hype has surrounded the bird's existence. Jackson has written a 15-page article disputing Luneau's findings.

Jackson says, “Measurements alone do not constitute scientific. The results of scientific effort must be verifiable independently by other scientists."

He believes the bird on the videotape is really a pileated woodpecker.

Luneau says they're similar, but not the same. The difference is in their wing pattern.

Luneau explains, “That's the easiest way to tell, they both have black and white in them. The ivory bill has a trailing edge that's white."

Whether those few seconds of video is hope or hype, both Luneau and Jackson say more evidence is needed to help further any more research.

Since its original sighting, 18 other sightings of the rare bird have been made.

Luneau says more evidence will be released in the coming months as to the discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

www.todaysthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=23192

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Ivory Bill Report Is Called 'Faith-Based Ornithology'

By JAMES GORMAN
Published: January 24, 2006
In the strongest published criticism yet of claims for the sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004, an ornithologist who was not involved in the search has called claims for proof of the bird's existence "faith-based ornithology."

The ivory bill was, or is, the largest North American woodpecker. It inhabited Southeastern forests that have been heavily logged, and the bird had been thought extinct, although occasional unconfirmed sightings have occurred often since the last confirmed one in the middle of the last century.

Then, in the spring of 2005, scientists announced that the bird had been found in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, prompting a surge of elation among birders and the general public, and later a steady current of questions and skepticism.

Jerome A. Jackson, an ivory bill specialist at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, has now increased the intensity of the discussion in a 15-page article in the current issue of The Auk, a quarterly ornithology journal published by the American Ornithologists' Union. In the article, Dr. Jackson writes of a "rush to publication" of the article in Science, published online in April 2005, that reported the 2004 sighting.

He also criticizes publicity about the sighting by conservation organizations and the Interior Department as the "selling" of the ivory bill and says the bird's existence has not been confirmed.

The strongest piece of evidence in the Science paper is a brief, blurry videotape that Dr. Jackson says shows a pileated woodpecker, not an ivory bill.

John W. Fitzpatrick, head of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., coordinator of the search and announcer of the discovery of the ivory bill, said in an interview after he had read Dr. Jackson's article that he stood by the paper in Science.

Dr. Fitzpatrick said, "I have not yet seen any detailed scrutiny of the video that disproves our case."

He said that what "hurts the most" is Dr. Jackson's accusation that the Cornell Lab and other groups had been "selling" the ivory bill to promote conservation and that this effort had taken over the science. "We've tried very hard not to oversell what we know," Dr. Fitzpatrick said.

The search is continuing at Cache River and the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

Dr. Fitzpatrick said the goal of the search, run by his lab, was to find a roost hole or evidence of a breeding pair. "We are still waiting for the prize," he said. "We have had a handful of moments when observers have seen what they are pretty sure is the bird. We don't have the next big clue, which is a roost hole."

Dr. Jackson said in an interview: "I am in no way saying that ivory bills are not out there. I really hope they are." But he added that he had not yet seen convincing evidence.

Richard O. Prum, at Yale, another ornithologist who is not part of the Cornell Lab effort, said he was watching the search with great interest. Last summer, he, Dr. Jackson and Mark B. Robbins of the University of Kansas wrote a critique of the Science paper. They submitted it for publication and then withdrew it as other evidence of the ivory bill accumulated, although they remained critical of the evidence in Science.

"I think the ball is in their court," Dr. Prum said. "I think they understand that to be universally accepted they're expected to find solid evidence and repeatable evidence of the bird this field season."

[another specialist]

melanie said:

New star of the bird world stars in lawsuit, too

Environmentalists trot out woodpecker to fight Arkansas irrigation project
As scientists debate whether the ivory-billed woodpecker, once widely assumed to have been extinct for decades, still haunts the Big Woods of Arkansas, environmentalists have enlisted the bird as a key soldier in their fight against a massive irrigation project.

A lawsuit to be heard Monday in federal court in Little Rock asks that work be halted on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Grand Prairie Area Demonstration Project until further environmental studies evaluate its potential effects on the woodpecker.


The $319 million project, which the corps says will save tapped-out groundwater aquifers in a 242,000-acre agricultural region, is “a recipe for disaster” for the bird, says Lisa Swann of the National Wildlife Federation, a plaintiff in the suit.

Not so, says corps biologist Ed Lambert, who maintains that a “biological assessment” done last spring determined Grand Prairie is unlikely to harm the woodpecker.

The irrigation project has been on the table since the mid-1980s, when studies showed that groundwater aquifers in the area, which lies in east-central Arkansas, were being depleted by rice growers. To solve that, the corps is working with farmers to build reservoirs on their land and elsewhere that will be filled via a canal and pipeline network with water pumped from the White River.

The corps says that in addition to helping replenish groundwater supplies, the project will create new waterfowl and shorebird habitat and food supply, reintroduce thousands of acres of native grasses and slow the depletion of hardwood forests.

‘Mammoth sucking machine’
But Swann’s group and others have long fought the Grand Prairie project as a federal boondoggle that poses serious environmental threats and squanders tax dollars to deliver huge subsidies to farmers. This “mammoth sucking machine” would hurt wetlands, degrade water quality and threaten species in the region from ducks to mussels, the National Wildlife Federation says in one publication about Grand Prairie.

The region is dear to the hearts of conservationists, hunters and other outdoors enthusiasts. Comprising more than half a million acres, less than a tenth of their original size and mostly in islands of trees surrounded by farmland, the Big Woods include the Cache and White River National Wildlife Refuges.


Previous legal actions to block the Grand Prairie project on environmental and jurisdictional issues have failed. So have political entreaties to block state and federal funding for Grand Prairie.

Enter the ivory-billed woodpecker, always rare, but presumed extinct for half a century by most ornithologists. Reported sightings of the 20-inch-long black-and-white birds since the 1940s had drawn derision from many experts since ivory-bills bear a strong resemblance to the smaller and rather common pileated woodpecker.

But the possibility that some ivory-bills were still digging beetles and grubs from the bottomland hardwood forests of Arkansas had long fascinated some birders.

Chief among them was Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, published by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Gallagher had become fascinated with the ivory-bill story in the 1970s and began working on a book about them in 2001. His research led him to dozens of people who claimed to have seen an ivory-bill, including Gene Sparling, who said he spotted a red-crested male of the species while one on a kayak outing in an eastern Arkansas bayou.

In February 2004, Gallagher and another birder joined Sparling on an expedition to the swamp and saw an ivory-bill for himself. The ensuing hoopla was unprecedented in ornithological circles. Additional expeditions and sightings followed. They culminated in an April 28, 2005, article in the journal Science by Cornell researchers and an official announcement by U.S. Interior Secretary Gail Norton on the same day that the ivory-bill was not extinct.

Norton pledged $10 million in federal funds for more research to confirm the existence of the bird. With many trees in the Big Woods now bare in the dead of winter, public and private efforts to capture photos and video of an ivory-bill are currently at a fever pitch. Despite the Cornell researchers’ presentation of numerous sightings, audio recordings of what they say are the woodpecker’s distinctive “double knock” and its “kent” call and one bit of grainy video footage of an alleged ivory-bill in flight, there are experts who remain skeptical that any of the birds are still alive.

But Norton’s announcement was good enough for the National Wildlife Federation and its Arkansas affiliate to demand that the corps halt work immediately on an early construction phase of Grand Prairie, a $35 million pumping station on the White River at DeValls Bluff.

In their lawsuit, the groups say that environmental studies for Grand Prairie were done years before the ivory-bill was rediscovered and that federal law requires new analysis, either a supplemental environmental assessment or an environmental impact statement as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Stressing that this “is a completely different case” from other environmental bids to shut Grand Prairie down, NWF senior counsel John Kostyack told MSNBC that his group has three fears for the bird’s future: Water withdrawals will change the ivory-bill’s habitat in harmful ways, perhaps killing off some trees or other vegetation vital for its survival; construction of the pump station and associated pipelines will destroy habitat; and increased noise and human activity could also harm the birds.

Seeking an injunction
At Monday’s hearing, before U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele, Kostyack is seeking an injunction to halt work on the pumping station while the additional environmental studies are performed. He believes that if new studies are done, “it would show all the harmful impacts, and that itself would sink the project and it wouldn't ever go back to court. We think that's the reason they didn't do one to begin with."

That’s “just jumping the gun,” says corps biologist Lambert. “Right now it’s just premature to determine if we need to do another NEPA document” because “there’s no reason to believe that we’d have any adverse affect on the woodpecker. … At this time, we just know that the ivory-billed woodpecker was discovered 14 miles from there and that we have some potential habitat.”

Lambert and Grand Prairie project manager Paul Hamm point out that the corps did stop major work on the pumping station last spring once officials learned that ivory-bills were in the region. But their “biological assessment” showed no immediate threat to the birds.

As to the plaintiffs’ specific concerns, Lambert says the corps has worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees endangered species, to develop “a plan to monitor the health of the bottomland hardwood forest,” considered prime ivory-bill habitat, as the project moves forward. Pipelines and canals will follow existing roads, avoiding woods “wherever possible.” The pumping station is being constructed in a former farm field where “machinery’s been running … for years” and it is “right by a major highway.”

Hamm says that an injunction as a result of the lawsuit will “obviously add cost and time to the project,” but right now he expects Grand Prairie to begin delivering water by 2010.

‘Truly a national treasure’
Kostyack is happy to have the bird as the centerpiece of the new legal action because all of the publicity around the ivory-bill “helps to highlight this ecosystem, which is not known around the country. It is truly a national treasure."

Meanwhile, Cornell’s Gallagher, who has now published “The Grail Bird” about the hunt for the ivory-bill, says it has been “a difficult year” in the bid for new sightings. “The water level is the lowest it’s been in years” in the swamps and bayous of the Big Woods, and “a lot of places, you can’t even get a canoe in there.”

Unfamiliar with the lawsuit that uses his ornithological obsession as its poster boy, Gallagher nevertheless backs as much environmental study as possible: “We don’t know why these birds are still there, so you don’t want to tamper with the hydrology of the area.”

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Rare bird sighting in dispute
Scientist doubts woodpecker found Sighting made

in Arkansas woods
Jan. 28, 2006. 01:00 AM
JAMES GORMAN
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE


In the strongest published criticism yet of claims for the sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, an ornithologist not involved in the search calls claims for proof of the bird's existence "faith-based ornithology."

The ivory bill was, or is, the largest North American woodpecker. It inhabited southeastern U.S. forests that have been heavily logged, and the bird had been thought extinct, although occasional unconfirmed sightings have occurred often since the last confirmed one in the middle of the last century.

Then, in the spring of 2005, scientists announced that the bird had been found in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, prompting a surge of elation among birders and, later, a steady current of questions and skepticism.

Jerome Jackson, an ivory bill specialist at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla., has raised the intensity of the discussion in a 15-page article in the current issue of The Auk, a quarterly ornithology journal published by the American Ornithologists' Union. In it, Jackson writes of a "rush to publication" of the article in Science, published online in April 2005, that reported the 2004 sighting.

He also criticizes publicity about the sighting by conservation organizations and the U.S. Department of the Interior as the "selling" of the ivory bill and says the bird's existence has not been confirmed.

The strongest piece of evidence in the Science paper is a brief, blurry videotape that Jackson says shows a pileated woodpecker, not an ivory bill.

John Fitzpatrick, head of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., co-ordinator of the search and announcer of the discovery of the ivory bill, says he stands by the Science paper.

"I have not yet seen any detailed scrutiny of the video that disproves our case," he says.

Fitzpatrick says what "hurts the most" is Jackson's accusation that the Cornell Lab and other groups had been "selling" the ivory bill to promote conservation and that this effort had taken over the science.

The search is continuing in wildlife refuges in Arkansas.

Fitzpatrick says the goal of the search was to find a roost hole or evidence of a breeding pair.

"We have had a handful of moments when observers have seen what they are pretty sure is the bird. We don't have the next big clue, which is a roost hole."

Jackson says he hopes the ivory bill is out there, but says he hasn't yet seen convincing evidence.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Trip to find rare ivory-billed woodpecker is treat for Sullivan bird enthusiast

It's called "The Grail Bird," a bird so rare, so sought after that it's considered the Holy Grail of ornithology.

In fact, the ivory-billed woodpecker had been thought to be extinct for more than half a century - until last year.

In 2005, researchers from Cornell University astounded the birding world by announcing that they had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker in the deep-forest swamps of Arkansas and even captured it on video.

Birders everywhere were amazed. A species that had evaded not just amateur birders, but professional scientists for decades had been shown to have returned from the dead - not just a Grail bird, a "Lazarus Bird."

Now, a Sullivan man has added his name to the short list of those who have seen the elusive bird.

David Johnson of Sullivan, a lifelong birder, says he saw one of the rare birds during an expedition last December in the same area as the Cornell sighting.

Johnson, chief executive officer of ASI Risk Management, an agricultural insurance company, visited the Mississippi River bayous of eastern Arkansas with Wayne Elmore, the firm's marketing representative in that state, who lives in the area and knows it well.

The two hoped to get a look at the once-in-a-lifetime bird themselves.


And they did.

"I was lucky," Johnson said. "I just happened to be looking at the exact spot where the bird took off.

"I'm 100 percent sure it was an ivory. There's nothing else that big that has those markings, and just before that, we had heard it call and rap," he said. "What's ironic about the whole thing is that people spent months looking for it, and we made contact in a few minutes."

Ivory-billed woodpeckers, named for their massive white bills, never were abundant. Though they originally ranged from eastern Texas to coastal Carolina and even into extreme Southern Illinois, they require vast tracts of mature forest for food and nesting habitat: One pair alone needs 10 square miles.

Logging and deforestation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries destroyed most of the southern forest, leaving only fragmented populations of the birds to survive. Hunting decimated those that remained. The last confirmed birds were found in the swamps of Louisiana, and the last one of those was seen in 1944.

Through the years, several expeditions were mounted to search for the birds. There were shreds of evidence: a mysterious rapping sound here, a suspected feeding cavity in a tree trunk there, but nothing conclusive.

Then in 2004, researchers from the world-renowned Cornell Ornithology Laboratory, searching for the bird in the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges in Arkansas, made contact. One of them even caught the bird in flight on video, which, though of poor quality, showed the unmistakable coloration pattern of the ivory bill, which distinguishes it from its common relative, the pileated woodpecker.

The rediscovery turned the ornithological community on its head as conservationists took quick action to preserve the forests where the remnant population survived.

It also inspired birders such as Johnson to see if they could get a glimpse, too.

When Johnson heard about the rediscovery, he mentioned it to one of his company's employees, Elmore, who has fished and hunted the bayous in the Big Woods area of Arkansas since the 1940s. Elmore invited Johnson down, and the pair set out to see what they could see.

"I went in December because the leaves would be off the trees," Johnson said. "Also because there has been a drought in Arkansas. There wasn't much water, and I knew we'd be able to walk around, so I knew we'd be able to cover a lot of ground in a short time."

Because federal conservation authorities want to control the number of people entering the refuge to protect the birds, users are required to obtain permits, which are limited.

"I went down on a Thursday and stayed at Wayne's house," Johnson said, "and we got up early the next morning to go to the refuge office to get our permits."

The two men figured the allotment would be gone for that day, but to their surprise, they were able to get an OK.

By about 9:30 a.m., the pair had arrived at the nearby Dagmar wildlife area, grabbed their cameras and binoculars, and set off.

"There's a lot of swamp there, with huge cypress and tupelo trees hundreds of years old, 8 feet around at the base," Johnson said. "But because it was dry, we were able to walk around like on a thick carpet, and since there's not a lot of underbrush, we could see well."

Only a few minutes passed before the two heard what Johnson said was the call and rapping of an ivory-billed.

"The call is very distinctive, and when he hits that tree with that bill, it sounds like a .22 (caliber) - 'bang, bang' - ricocheting through the forest," Johnson said.

Johnson and Elmore continued to walk, stopping every now and then to listen. But they saw nothing, and getting cold, decided to return to their truck to warm up.

It was about 10:30 a.m. as they were walking.

"About 80 feet in front of me, I saw something flush from the base of a tree," Johnson said. "As the bird came up, I got a real good look at it. The bottom half of the top side of wing was white, and this bird had a 30-inch wingspan.

"There's no doubt in my mind it was not a pileated. A pileated doesn't have that marking on top, and it's not as big a bird, and this one had two white stripes up its neck. I had about a two-second look at it, and I feel it was a female bird because I did not see a red crest.

"We just happened to sneak up on him and flush him," he said. "Otherwise, we would have never known he was there."

Johnson and Elmore saw other woodpeckers after that, but none were ivory-billed woodpeckers. In time, they met up with some Cornell researchers working in the area and reported the sighting. Over the rest of the weekend, they searched other areas in the refuge system but were unsuccessful.

For Johnson, however, one sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker is enough.

"I've been birding for 60 years, ever since I was a kid," Johnson said. "A lot of bird habitat has been destroyed, trees bulldozed and chemicals used, so it's really great to see populations making a comeback."

Tim Zgonina can be reached at tzgonina@;jg-tc.com.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Woodpecker Making A Comeback

By LAUREN HOUGH

SHEPHERDSTOWN — For more than 60 years, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was believed to be extinct — its Southern habitat had been all but completely logged, and even the earliest conservation efforts in the 1930s and ’40s came too late.

Then in February 2004, Gene Sparling claimed to have seen the reclusive swamp-dwelling bird while kayaking in Arkansas. A couple months after his sighting, two scientists confirmed it was true — the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was still in existence.

“It almost never happens that something we think is extinct reappears,” said Mark Madison, a historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The rediscovery of the bird, which wasn’t officially announced until last year, was brought into the spotlight further as a result of its uncanny timing. The found woodpecker revealed itself just eight short months after the release of Phillip Hoose’s book, “The Race to Save the Lord God Bird: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.”

Hoose, who presented a talk by the same title as his book to an audience at the National Conservation and Training Center in Shepherdstown this week, had wanted to write a book about extinction to let people know it was tragic and preventable and worth the attention it received, he said. He was looking for a “Clark Gable of a bird, and a Gone With the Wind type of story.”

His main character, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, is the most important endangered species in U.S history, said Hoose, a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences.

With a 3-foot wingspan, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is the biggest woodpecker in North America, he said. It is boldly patterned and has yellow eyes and a prominent long, ivory-colored bill.

“It’s a bird that everybody seemed to want to name,” Hoose said. At last count, the woodpecker was known by 18 nicknames, including the Lord God bird.

“It’s an expression of awe,” Hoose explained. “It just startled people when it would tear down through the canopy ... they’d say, ‘Lord God, what a bird!’”

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker would be remembered for more than just its looks, though.

“It changed the way birds were studied in the United States,” he said. “It converted techniques from shooting and stuffing birds to studying them alive in their ecosystems.”

While it was poached for its bill — worn by American Indians and sometimes thought to contain mystical powers — the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker slipped to the brink of extinction because its habitat was destroyed, Hoose said.

After the Civil War, a market opened up for trees in Southern forests, he said during his presentation. Hundred-thousand-acre forests sold for $1 an acre. One pristine area was preserved after the initial logging — a large tract of land in Louisiana owned by the Singer Sewing Machine company.

“Almost every animal that had ever lived in the Singer tract was still there,” he said — including the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.

A group of scientists from Cornell University took an expedition through the Singer tract in 1935, during which they used the day’s cutting-edge Hollywood technology to record the sounds of the birds that were close to becoming extinct.

A small population of the birds survived in the area, despite fertility complications from inbreeding depression.

Eventually, though, the Singer tract became subject to logging as well, as World War II created yet another market for wood.

In the years that followed, the bird remained somewhat of a phantom — supposed sightings were mentioned from time to time, but lacked conclusive evidence that the species did still exist.

It was another team from Cornell that would videotape a white-tinged wing in some Arkansas swamplands, tipped off by Sparling’s initial claim that he had seen an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. After analyzing their footage and recreating the swamp scene, the team published an article in Science magazine, confirming their rediscovery of the bird.

“It was quite thrilling for me,” Hoose said. “It’s been surprising and wonderful.”

Hoose, a staff member of the Nature Conservancy since 1977, has traveled from his Portland, Maine, home to Arkansas to look for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker a few times with a search team, and hopes to go again soon.

He is excited by the chance to rebuild the woodpecker’s home — the Big Woods Conservancy Area — and turn it into a more optimal habitat, or, as he put it, upgrade the once homeless species “from a three-star to a five-star hotel.”

The bird has sparked heightened conservation efforts for many plant and animal species across the country with its reappearance.

“We need to rebuild, restore, recreate and reconnect a good, solid, hard-bottomed forest and redeem ourselves,” Hoose said. “I think we owe it to the country. We have a second chance.”

The lessons the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker have taught citizens and conservationists alike go beyond the realm of the Arkansas forests and the deep South and can apply just as much to our state, said Rodney Bartgis, state director of the Nature Conservancy in West Virginia.

There is even a story similar to that of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker that occurred in the state, Bartgis said.

The running buffalo clover, a plant species that grew along the trail of the bison from West Virginia to Missouri, was thought to have gone extinct with its animal namesake. After nearly 50 years of believing it no longer existed, the plant was found in the West Virginia hills. It has since been placed on the endangered species list.

“The Nature Conservancy’s specialty is to try and protect the land and waters that animals and plants depend upon,” Bartgis said.

With the amount of negative news that surrounds the topic of the environment, “it’s a good thing when there’s these surprises,” he said.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Judge May Halt Project to Protect Bird
Saturday February 11, 2006 4:29am


JONESBORO, Ark. (AP) - A federal judge heard arguments Monday over whether a vast irrigation project intended to help farmers in eastern Arkansas will harm the rare ivory-billed woodpecker. U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson was asked by environmentalists to temporarily stop the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project and order the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct more environmental studies on the bird's habitat.

The judge said he would rule as soon as possible and might have a telephone conference with the lawyers before making a decision.

Work began on the $320 million project last summer with construction of a pump station. The station is expected to be complete, if allowed to proceed, in two years. The project would draw 158 billion gallons per year from the White River. Farmers have been using underground aquifers but their continued use threatens to deplete that natural resource.

Attorneys for the National Wildlife Federation and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation argued Monday that the project will kill off trees and its noise will stress the bird.

The bird was believed to be extinct until kayaker and bird watcher Gene Sparling spotted the animal two years ago and scientists confirmed its existence in the Cache River Wildlife Refuge near Brinkley. The U.S. Interior Department last spring announced the bird's rediscovery.

Plaintiffs lawyer John Kostyack said Monday that 135 acres of forest will be destroyed to construct the pump station and an entire species of trees will die when the water is withdrawn. He said the bird's habitat includes mature trees but the trees lost with the project take 80-100 years to mature.

In addition, he said, the 14 miles between where the bird was spotted and the pumping site is not wide enough because the bird's home range is 17 miles.

"This is one of the most endangered birds in the world," Kostyack told the judge. But "the Corps wants to move this project ahead as quickly as they can because they fear this bird will be a death blow to the project."

The corps conducted a study that concluded the irrigation project would not significantly destroy the ivory-billed's habitat. But the environmental groups allege the study was flawed and too narrow, and failed to comply with federal law that protects endangered species. They said the government also should have gotten public comment for the survey.

"If we allow the Corps to get away with what it is proposing, we will simply never know the impacts of this project," Kostyack said.

U.S. Justice Department lawyer Bridget McNeil said that, after the woodpecker was captured on tape, work on the irrigation project stopped until the corps determined that the pumping station would not harm the bird's habitat. McNeil said most of the pipeline will follow roadway rights-of-way or will be placed in farms or small stands of trees, she said.

A 30-day delay of the project would cost the corps as much as $264,000 and a six-month wait would cost more than $3 million, she said.

She also told the judge that one of the plaintiffs' own experts has questioned whether the bird was even spotted in the area.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Public invited to hear about rediscovery of ‘Ghost Bird’
BY ALGIS J. LAUKAITIS / Lincoln Journal Star

A young Bobby Harrison saw his first ivory-billed woodpecker on the pages of the April 7, 1972, issue of Life magazine. More than 30 years later on Feb. 27, 2004, in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas, he was one of the first three people to spot the mysterious bird, long thought to be extinct.

The last time anyone had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker in the wild was more than 60 years ago.

Harrison, an award-winning nature photographer, will discuss his lifelong obsession with the elusive bird during a 7 p.m. presentation Thursday at Union College.

“I want to tell the story about the history of the bird, how it was thought to be demised and what caused that, and those people who looked for it,” Harrison said in a recent phone interview.

Many people who claimed over the years to have spotted the bird were ostracized and their reports rejected. That changed last April, when news of the bird’s existence was announced.

News of the rediscovery shocked the birding world. Over the years, the ivory-billed woodpecker became known as the “Ghost Bird” or “Grail Bird” because of its elusive nature.

“The rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker is arguably the greatest event in ornithology in more than a century,” said Russell Duerksen, a local attorney and ornithology teacher at Union College.

Harrison, also an associate professor of art and photography at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., began searching earnestly for ivory-bills in 1995 in Florida.

His fascination with the bird led him to explore swamps in Louisiana and Georgia, talking to anyone who may have seen the bird. He continued to look for it off and on as he pursued his education and career. He acknowledged he spent more time in libraries, learning all he could about birds, than in the field.

In early 2004, a kayaker reported seeing a strange woodpecker in a swamp in Arkansas.

Harrison and a friend, Tim Gallagher, checked it out. On their second outing into the swamp, an ivory-billed woodpecker flew about 70 feet in front of their canoe.

Despite years of study, Harrison and Gallagher didn’t recognize the rare bird at first. But as it flew closer, they saw its distinct markings, including a tell-tale flash of white on a secondary wing.

“Tim and I immediately yelled ‘ivory-bill’ simultaneously,” Harrison said. “…We were in total shock.”

It was the first time since 1944 that two qualified observers identified an ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States.

“The ivory-bill is a big bird. It was there but nobody knew it. It was just in hiding,” said Harrison, now 51.

Harrison has since seen an ivory-billed woodpecker five times. He doesn’t know if some of those sightings were of the same bird, but he did see a female and a male.

He spends part of his time touring the country, talking about the importance of the bird and preserving its habitat. And he’s amazed at the interest in it, he said.

“It’s been phenomenal.”

Reach Algis J. Laukaitis at 473-7243 or [e-mail]

‘Ghost Bird’ mania

Who: Bobby Harrison, one of the first to spot the rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker.

What: “Obsessed with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” his first-hand account of spotting the rare bird.

When: 7 p.m. Thursday (doors open at 6 p.m.) Seating is limited.

Where: Union College, Everett Administration Building, lower level amphitheater, 3800 S. 48th St.

Public invited to hear about the demise and rediscovery of the rare and elusive ‘Ghost Bird’

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Once-thought Extinct Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Rediscovered in Arkansas



WASHINGTON n Responding to the dramatic rediscovery of the Ivory-billed woodpecker at the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns Thursday, April 28, announced a multi-year, multi-million-dollar partnership effort to aid the rare bird's survival. The bird has been thought to be extinct in the United States for more than 60 years.

"This is a rare second chance to preserve through cooperative conservation what was once thought lost forever," Norton said. "Decisive conservation action and continued progress through partnerships are now required. I will appoint the best talent in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local citizens to develop a Corridor of Hope Cooperative Conservation Plan to save the Ivory-billed woodpecker."

The "Corridor of Hope" refers to the Big Woods of Arkansas, an area about 120 miles long and up to 20 miles wide in eastern Arkansas where the Ivory-billed woodpecker has been sighted.

The Interior Department, along with the Department of Agriculture, has proposed that more than $10 million in federal funds be committed to protect the bird. This amount would supplement $10 million already committed to research and habitat protection efforts by private sector groups and citizens, an amount expected to grow once news of the rediscovery spreads. Federal funds will be used for research and monitoring, recovery planning and public education. In addition, the funds will be used t o enhance law enforcement and conserve habitat through conservation easements, safe-harbor agreements and conservation reserves.

"Finding a species once thought extinct is a rare and exciting event, and USDA is pleased to be a partner in the effort to protect Ivory-billed woodpeckers," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said. "At the same time, we understand that habitat conservation can impact landowners. That's why we're going to reach out to work cooperatively with stakeholders so we can all share in the joy of this discovery."

The action by Secretary Norton and Secretary Johanns came in response to news from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy, and other members of the Big Woods Conservation Partnership that they had collected primary and secondary evidence of the bird's existence in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. The primary evidence consists of video footage, while the secondary evidence consists of seven eye-witness sightings and audio evidence of the Ivory-billed woodpecker. In addition, recordings of the distinctive double rap of the bird are still under analysis. After conducting its own peer reviews of the evidence, the journal Science is now publishing these findings.

Secretary Norton congratulated Dr. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Scott Simon, Arkansas state director of The Nature Conservancy, for the cooperative, diligent, year-long research of their teams. Following credible reports of sightings of the bird, a multi-partner team led by Fitzpatrick and Simon, assisted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission spent more than a year in the Big Woods of Arkansas searching for this rare bird. The evidence collected led scientists to conclude that the Ivory-billed woodpecker is now present in the Big Woods of Arkansas.

"Our next step to recover the bird must be as patient and thoughtful as the collection of evidence to confirm the existence of the bird," Norton said. "As we learn more, we will adjust our cooperative management effort."

The Ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the United States, is the second largest in the world and had been one of six species of birds in North America thought to be extinct. Prior to this recent rediscovery, there had been no confirmed sightings of the bird in more than 60 years.

After consulting with Governor Mike Huckabee and other officials at the federal, state and local levels, the Interior Department will appoint members to a Corridor of Hope Cooperative Conservation team. Sam Hamilton, regional director for the Southeast Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, will lead the team.

Secretary Norton also announced that the department will appoint technical experts to assist the conservation team in writing a recovery plan. The team will include Dr. Jim Tate, science advisor to Secretary Norton and a noted ornithologist, and David Mehlman, director of the Migratory Bird Program at The Nature Conservancy.

The Corridor of Hope and recovery teams have nine assignments. They will:

-- Help develop and implement plans for local citizens to participate in writing a recovery plan that maintains historic public uses of land while protecting the bird's habitat.

-- Provide information for the consultation process required under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act to ensure that actions by federal agencies conserve endangered species.

--Provide information to private landowners on the voluntary conservation activities provided for in Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act.

--Help develop and implement plans to manage visitor access. Response to the rediscovery is expected to trigger increased interest from bird enthusiasts and researchers. The conservation team will carefully evaluate management actions for public access to ensure opportunities to see the areas where the bird has been sighted and to facilitate research without jeopardizing its survival.

--Recommend to Secretary Norton others from local, state and federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, conservation groups hunting and fishing groups as well as private landowners who should be included in the recovery planning effort.

--Make recommendations for habitat that needs to be conserved through conservation easements, safe harbor agreements, purchase from willing sellers or other means.

--Help develop research and monitoring protocols. The recovery team will also reexamine previous credible reports of sightings in its historic range over the last few decades.

--Develop recommendations for the best use of federal funds being allocated to aid the bird's recovery, utilize the Cooperative Agreement with the State of Arkansas under section 6 of the Endangered Species Act and work with private partners to integrate federal funds with private funds as part of an overall recovery plan.

--Develop effective communications tools, including the Internet, to inform bird enthusiasts, hunters, anglers, and others about significant developments related to the presence of this bird and its ultimate recovery.

The conservation efforts to be established for the benefit of the Ivory-billed woodpecker will emphasize working with local citizens and private landowners. The Interior Department will invite them to help develop the multi-year recovery plan that maintains historic public uses of land while protecting the bird's habitat.

The recovery plan will adjust to emerging knowledge of these rare birds, their activities and habitat. Priority will be placed on developing a long-term plan that integrates federal, state, local and private resources. Recovery efforts will utilize partnerships, safe harbor agreements, easements and land purchases from willing sellers.

Through its cooperative conservation initiative, the Fish and Wildlife Service has a variety of grant and technical aid programs to support wildlife recovery. "These programs are the heart and soul of the federal government's commitment to cooperative conservation," Norton said. "They are perfectly tailored to recover this magnificent bird. Just as innovation and partnership are recovering whooping cranes that were nearly extinct, I am hopeful that by working together, a secure future lies ahead for the Ivory-billed woodpecker."

Cooperative conservation focuses on performance, partnerships, innovation and incentives to achieve the nation's environmental goals. The programs preserve millions of acres of habitat, improve riparian habitat along thousands of miles of streams and develop conservation plans for endangered species and their habitat across the country.

In addition to attracting the Ivory-billed woodpecker, the "Corridor of Hope," including the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, is home to seven endangered species and 265 species of birds—over a quarter of the U.S. total. Some 80 percent of the fish species in the lower Mississippi River Valley inhabit the waters in the area, which also boasts thousand-year-old tupelo and cypress trees.

The refuge remains open to visitors. However, while determining the appropriate level of use, refuge managers have, on an interim basis, established a 5,000-acre managed access area in the 65,000-acre refuge. The Fish and Wildlife Service has established five access points for refuge visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the woodpecker. The service is working with refuge partners on the construction of viewing towers to make viewing easier. In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service has increased its law enforcement presence in the refuge to ensure protection of the refuge's resources, including the rediscovered bird.

The Ivory-billed woodpecker has been admired by birders and for many years. Phillip Hoose, in his book titled The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, wrote that many who have observed the bird, from John James Audubon to President Theodore Roosevelt, have nicknamed it "Lord God bird" and "Good God bird."


Questions and Answers: Access to Cache River National Wildlife Refuge

What laws protect the ivory-billed woodpecker?

The ivory-billed woodpecker is an endangered species and is afforded protection through the Endangered Species Act, the Refuge Administration Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act of 1997, and other federal and state legislation.

Is the service restricting access to the location where the bird was found?

Beginning immediately, the service has established a managed access area of approximately 5,000 acres within the Bayou DeView drainage from Highway 38 southward to Dagmar WMA. Only researchers will be allowed access into this area. A map is provided on the refuge's website (http://www.fws.gov/cacheriver/index.html) and is available through the refuge office showing the designated managed access area.

Is access limited to the entire refuge?

No. Over 55,000 acres representing the majority of the refuge is still open to the public for all permitted public use activities, including hunting, fishing and boating.

How can I see the bird?

The service expects an influx of birders from across the country and beyond to come to see the bird. The best opportunity for birders to add this bird to their life list is on the adjacent Dagmar Wildlife Management Area, managed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Good viewing areas are designated on the associated map (http://www.fws.gov/cacheriver/index.html). The service is working with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, and The Nature Conservancy to provide additional viewing sites, which are expected to be available in early May.

Can I use recorded, mechanical or otherwise artificial calls to draw in the bird?

No. Any means to artificially call the bird is strictly prohibited.

www.ashleycountyledger.com/articles/2006/02/17/news/h16f398.txt

[another specialist]

melanie said:

'Extinct' birds that are still around
America's ivory-billed woodpecker is long extinct. Or is it? Michael Park meets the British ornithologist whose grainy video footage has created a twitching frenzy in the remote swamps of Arkansas
Published: 19 February 2006
Long before the sun has risen over the Big Woods in Arkansas, Sheffield native and life-long ornithologist, Tim Gallagher wanders quietly into his hotel's lobby ready to begin searching for a bird that some people believe is no more than a ghost. Dressed in full camouflage, Gallagher stares out into the stubborn darkness as he waits for his friend and fellow birdwatcher, Bobby Harrison.

"Today could be the day," Harrison says as he strolls into the lobby moments later. A jovial American from Alabama, he, too, is dressed in camouflage clothing. "You could bring us luck," he whispers in his gentle southern accent; but, dressed in jeans and a bright-blue waterproof jacket, I doubt I am any kind of talisman.

Gallagher has invited me to this previously anonymous part of America to take part in the search for a woodpecker, but not just any woodpecker.

Campephilus principalis, or, as it is more commonly known, the ivory-billed woodpecker, is either one of the world's rarest birds or a species as dead as the dodo. For the past 60 years, common wisdom suggested there were no more ivory-bills left alive anywhere; anyone who claimed to have seen one was thought to be either a liar or a fool. But in April 2005 all that changed when Gallagher and Harrison led a group that announced to the world that in February 2004 they had seen an ivory-bill deep in the swamps of Arkansas.

Yet they couldn't produce a photograph to back up their claim, nor anything more than a blurry video that "experts" had to analyse before proclaiming that the black-and-white speck seen flying quickly away in the background was indeed a mythical ivory-bill.

So now, nearly a year after the announcement of the bird's "rediscovery" and nearly two years since they claim to have seen it, Gallagher and Harrison are back to renew their search for this flying Big Foot, hoping to capture it cleanly on film. This time, they are not alone.

Until that cold day in February 2004 when they saw the bird - not far from where we're now heading - they were used to searching for their elusive prey quietly and without fanfare. But as soon as they shared their sighting with other people, this quickly became the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, in the woods today we could easily find as many as 30 other people looking specifically for this elusive bird.

The fact that this part of Arkansas and the nearby town of Brinkley are now being flooded with a mix of professional, amateur and truly amateurish bird watchers is due entirely to fact that pretty much everyone Gallagher and Harrison told about their sighting believed them, and with good reason. Both are life-long birders (in fact Harrison had been searching for ivory-bills for 19 years before he saw one) and have impeccable credentials.

Harrison, 50, a big, bearded, bear of a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, is a school teacher who has spent a lot of his adult life crossing America in search of rare and beautiful birds. Last year he was the first person to deploy life-sized ivory-bill decoys in the hope of attracting a curious real one.

Gallagher, 55, is the son of a former Royal Navy officer. The family moved to the US when he was still a child, but he has never relinquished his British passport and he has the manners of a country gentleman and the brain of an Oxford don. For the past 15 years he has been the editor of one of the most respected birding magazines in America, Living Bird, published by the prestigious Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University in New York State.

Until Gallagher and Harrison's sighting, the ivory-billed woodpecker was believed to have become extinct in the 1940s due to decades of logging and the destruction of the type of trees and habitat the bird needed to survive.

"If you said you'd seen an ivory-bill the first thing anyone would say is you're mistaken or you're a liar," Gallagher tells me as we head for a location where he believes we might spot one.

Yet for a small group of bird lovers, the story of this large, graceful woodpecker proved too romantic to ignore and, without ever telling anyone about it, people such as Gallagher and Harrison kept searching in places they believed the bird could survive. "I was always of the idea that the bird just wouldn't roll over and die when the last big tree was cut," says Harrison.

After a long drive down dirt roads with open fields on either side, and through cotton fields stripped of their precious harvest, we park by the side of what should be a water-filled swamp. Yet there has been so little rain in this part of the state recently that we are going to walk deep into parts that are normally only accessible by canoe.

Massive, moss-covered cypress and tupelo trees stretch infinitely into the distance and only bird calls occasionally pierce the otherwise eerie silence.

"There used to be hundreds of ivory-bills living in swamps just like this across the south and south-eastern parts of the United States," Gallagher says as we trudge through muddy swamp, crunching fallen leaves as we travel. "But with unregulated logging and the unchecked hunting of the birds by collectors, they disappeared."

Given the ivory-bill's close resemblance to another species of bird, the pileated woodpecker, which thrives in a wider variety of habitats, any sightings after 1944 were presumed to be pileated woodpeckers rather than ivory-bills.

"The naysayers got so powerful," sighs Gallagher. "And what is so disappointing is the ornithologists who had contact with people who claimed to have seen ivory-bills just didn't follow up because they were afraid it would taint their careers."

Gallagher didn't have a career to taint but even when he did end up editing birding magazines, he remained fascinated enough by the story of the ivory-bill and whispered tales of occasional sightings that he decided to write a book about the species and some people's relentless quest to prove it was not yet extinct.

Then, in February 2004, one of the individuals he had contacted about a sighting emailed him a dairy entry which had been posted on a kayaking website by Gene Sparling, an avid naturalist. Sparling, who had just completed a three-day trip deep into the Arkansas swamp, reported seeing tree stumps large enough to sleep on and numerous varieties of instantly recognisable animals and birds.

"Also, and I hesitate to say this, saw a pilated [sic] woodpecker that was way too big," wrote Sparling. "The white and black colours seemed to be reversed on the wings, and the white was yellowish off-white. You birders know what is inferred, but I don't have the conviction to say."

After reading this report, Gallagher called Sparling and after speaking to him for nearly an hour believed that Sparling had indeed seen an ivory-bill.

"You can tell in five minutes if someone is a good enough observer to be reliable and then it takes a little longer to work out if they are really truthful," explains Gallagher. "The way he described it, it could only have been an ivory-bill."

A trip to where Sparling had seen the bird was hurriedly arranged and less than a week later Gallagher, Harrison and Sparling were paddling deep into an area called Bayou de View.

On the second day of their trip the now legendary sighting occurred. I ask Harrison to recall the event for what must be the thousandth time.

"Oh, it's the first time every time I tell it," he says to me as his voice begins to crack and tears fill his eyes. "Tim and I were right down this lake right here. Right here. We got down to the end of it. We look off to the right and here comes this bird flying through the trees and... I don't know what I'm looking at. It is a black bird heading towards me at an angle. And then it turned, left wing down, right wing up and it revealed that white pattern on the back of the bird and we both pointed and said 'ivory-bill!'

"All of a sudden I'm in shock. I've got tears coming out of my eyes and we're trying to get the canoe ashore and I'm trying to chase the bird through the woods and it's gone and I know I'm not going to catch up with it."

Harrison presumed that later that day or the next they would see it again and be able to photograph it. But despite another few days of searching and one more possible fleeting glimpse of the bird, they left the swamp without the proof they craved.

Standing here surrounded by thousands of wildly growing tupelos, it becomes easy to see just how hard it would be to follow any bird, let alone be able to train a camera on it should one happen to fly by.

Yet, without any photographic proof, Gallagher still thought he had to tell his boss at Cornell that he was "100 per cent certain" he had seen one.

"It was the first time two qualified observers had seen the bird simultaneously since 1944," Gallagher. explains "That made a difference. And I'm a conservative birder. I've never made a bogus call."

Gallagher's boss, John Fitzpatrick, was stunned, but accepted what Gallagher told him and realising how important a "rediscovery" this was for not only the birding world, but also for the whole environmental community, he immediately wanted to focus some of Cornell's considerable resources on commencing an organised search for the bird.

Yet Fitzpatrick also knew the potentially damaging consequences of making claims of an ivory-bill's existence without any hard evidence, so he dispatched a clandestine team of researchers to Arkansas, swore everyone to secrecy and code-named the bird "Elvis".

For 12 months they scoured the woods and while there were some further "credible" sightings, only Harrison and one other team member were able to capture on video what are believed to be ivory-billed woodpeckers (it is impossible to ascertain whether it is the same bird on both videos).

As the field season drew to a close in spring 2005, Cornell, environmental group The Nature Conservancy, several local and federal Fish and Wildlife agencies as well as the US Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, announced to the world that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered and that funds were being made available to help preserve the area in Arkansas in which the bird was believed to be living.

Since then more than £5m of federal money has been channelled into the project; three million trees are being planted; 20,000 acres of private land have been bought and added to the relevant conservation area; signs telling people how to recognise an ivory-bill have been posted at every location where people can enter the swamp; tourists have arrived from all over the world to try to catch a glimpse of the bird; and local entrepreneurs are offering "ivory-bill tours" for up to £100 a day.

Yet still no one has been able to produce a solid, clear, cleanly framed photograph or video that would make the front page of any newspaper or the "And finally... " section of the evening's television news, despite more than 20,000 search hours being logged by authorised, organised, qualified ornithologists armed with digital cameras, GPS systems and powerful binoculars. Some experts believe it may be because the species is indeed extinct.

"There are a lot of reasons to believe the ivory-bill woodpecker is an extinct species," says Richard Prum, who is the curator of ornithology at Yale University's Peabody museum.

"All of the proffered evidence, and there is not a lot, is incomplete and inconclusive," Prum tells me when I speak to him by telephone. "All of the people who have seen it fleetingly are true believers and magical things happen to true believers."

Prum claims there is no scientific reason why the bird should not be able to be found, if it is alive, and that with so many people searching the area, it could not avoid detection indefinitely. "If these people haven't produced irrefutable evidence by the end of the field season in April, then they will have a lot of explaining to do," he says.

Harrison has his own theories as to why the bird is proving so elusive: "I think there are too many people searching at this point," he says. "This is a very wary bird and so going from the hotel to the swamp every day and visiting doesn't work. I think you have to live out there for a while. Also the area is so huge."

continued....

[another specialist]

melanie said:

An ivory-bill can reportedly cover more than 12 miles a day in search of food and the Big Woods in Arkansas spread over 750 square miles - an area slightly larger than the whole of Greater London. "There may be no more than two or three ivory-bills living here," Harrison adds, making the search the equivalent of looking for "a flying needle in a haystack."

Searchers have so far identified 375 possible nesting sites but have only observed 200 of those with remote cameras (none were found to be ivory-bill nests).

As we reach a hidden lake deep in the swamp where several sightings have been reported, we come across a rather surreal sight. Halfway up a tree on the other side of the still lake we can see a man's head. He appears to be sitting in a large basket attached to the tree.

"That's one of the volunteers," explains Gallagher. This year, funding from Cornell of more than £400,000 is available for 21 full-time staff to search full time for ivory-bills as well as for the recruitment and deployment of over 100 volunteers, a dozen hi-tech remote cameras and 30 autonomous recording devices. John Kemp, the man in the tree, is one of those volunteers and he is spending all day, every day for the next two weeks watching from his tree basket for any sign of an ivory-bill. Harrison shouts across and asks if he has seen anything. "No," he shouts back.

We stand quietly in the swamp for a while and watch and wait. We see otters and beavers and turtles and three other species of woodpecker, but no sign of Elvis.

I don't doubt that Gallagher, Harrison and Sparling believe they saw an ivory-bill - they have too much integrity to lie and should have too much experience to be mistaken - but its whereabouts in the Big Woods and why a nesting site can't be found remain a mystery.

We decide to call it a day. As we wander back through the ash-grey trees I ask Gallagher what he hopes will happen in the coming months.

"I hope we get the most solid evidence imaginable," says Gallagher. "But that's what we wanted to happen last year and it didn't." Until it does, the swamps of Arkansas will continue to be filled with confederates or dunces, depending on who you believe.

'The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker' by Tim Gallagher (Houghton Mifflin, $25), is available from www.amazon.co.uk

Flying miracles

More supposedly extinct birds that have startled ornithologists

Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi) This species, previously only known from a few examples collected in the 19th century, made a dramatic reappearance in Papua New Guinea late last year.

Edward's pheasant (Lophura edwardsi) After last being seen in central Vietnam in 1928, it survived several wars and the scrutiny of half a dozen French expeditions before reappearing in 1998.

Indian forest owlet (Athene blewitti) If there was a prize for hiding from biologists, twitchers, collectors and tourists, this diminutive bird would surely win. In 1996, it was rediscovered after 113 years in hiding.

Chinese crested tern (Thalasseus bernsteini) Thought to have become extinct when specimen hunters killed 21 of them in 1938, four pairs popped up in 2001 on Taiwan's Matsu Island. It's hoped the presence of 18,000 troops and a missile base at its breeding ground will deter collectors this time around.

Aleutian Canada Goose (Branta canadensis leucopareia) In 1967, numbering fewer than 500, these birds were declared to be endangered. They then disappeared completely for 25 years but subsequently made a dramatic comeback, and now number some 40,000 animals. Alistair Crighton

Long before the sun has risen over the Big Woods in Arkansas, Sheffield native and life-long ornithologist, Tim Gallagher wanders quietly into his hotel's lobby ready to begin searching for a bird that some people believe is no more than a ghost. Dressed in full camouflage, Gallagher stares out into the stubborn darkness as he waits for his friend and fellow birdwatcher, Bobby Harrison.

"Today could be the day," Harrison says as he strolls into the lobby moments later. A jovial American from Alabama, he, too, is dressed in camouflage clothing. "You could bring us luck," he whispers in his gentle southern accent; but, dressed in jeans and a bright-blue waterproof jacket, I doubt I am any kind of talisman.

Gallagher has invited me to this previously anonymous part of America to take part in the search for a woodpecker, but not just any woodpecker.

Campephilus principalis, or, as it is more commonly known, the ivory-billed woodpecker, is either one of the world's rarest birds or a species as dead as the dodo. For the past 60 years, common wisdom suggested there were no more ivory-bills left alive anywhere; anyone who claimed to have seen one was thought to be either a liar or a fool. But in April 2005 all that changed when Gallagher and Harrison led a group that announced to the world that in February 2004 they had seen an ivory-bill deep in the swamps of Arkansas.

Yet they couldn't produce a photograph to back up their claim, nor anything more than a blurry video that "experts" had to analyse before proclaiming that the black-and-white speck seen flying quickly away in the background was indeed a mythical ivory-bill.

So now, nearly a year after the announcement of the bird's "rediscovery" and nearly two years since they claim to have seen it, Gallagher and Harrison are back to renew their search for this flying Big Foot, hoping to capture it cleanly on film. This time, they are not alone.

Until that cold day in February 2004 when they saw the bird - not far from where we're now heading - they were used to searching for their elusive prey quietly and without fanfare. But as soon as they shared their sighting with other people, this quickly became the exception rather than the norm. Indeed, in the woods today we could easily find as many as 30 other people looking specifically for this elusive bird.

The fact that this part of Arkansas and the nearby town of Brinkley are now being flooded with a mix of professional, amateur and truly amateurish bird watchers is due entirely to fact that pretty much everyone Gallagher and Harrison told about their sighting believed them, and with good reason. Both are life-long birders (in fact Harrison had been searching for ivory-bills for 19 years before he saw one) and have impeccable credentials.

Harrison, 50, a big, bearded, bear of a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, is a school teacher who has spent a lot of his adult life crossing America in search of rare and beautiful birds. Last year he was the first person to deploy life-sized ivory-bill decoys in the hope of attracting a curious real one.

Gallagher, 55, is the son of a former Royal Navy officer. The family moved to the US when he was still a child, but he has never relinquished his British passport and he has the manners of a country gentleman and the brain of an Oxford don. For the past 15 years he has been the editor of one of the most respected birding magazines in America, Living Bird, published by the prestigious Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University in New York State.

Until Gallagher and Harrison's sighting, the ivory-billed woodpecker was believed to have become extinct in the 1940s due to decades of logging and the destruction of the type of trees and habitat the bird needed to survive.

"If you said you'd seen an ivory-bill the first thing anyone would say is you're mistaken or you're a liar," Gallagher tells me as we head for a location where he believes we might spot one.

Yet for a small group of bird lovers, the story of this large, graceful woodpecker proved too romantic to ignore and, without ever telling anyone about it, people such as Gallagher and Harrison kept searching in places they believed the bird could survive. "I was always of the idea that the bird just wouldn't roll over and die when the last big tree was cut," says Harrison.

After a long drive down dirt roads with open fields on either side, and through cotton fields stripped of their precious harvest, we park by the side of what should be a water-filled swamp. Yet there has been so little rain in this part of the state recently that we are going to walk deep into parts that are normally only accessible by canoe.

Massive, moss-covered cypress and tupelo trees stretch infinitely into the distance and only bird calls occasionally pierce the otherwise eerie silence.

"There used to be hundreds of ivory-bills living in swamps just like this across the south and south-eastern parts of the United States," Gallagher says as we trudge through muddy swamp, crunching fallen leaves as we travel. "But with unregulated logging and the unchecked hunting of the birds by collectors, they disappeared."

Given the ivory-bill's close resemblance to another species of bird, the pileated woodpecker, which thrives in a wider variety of habitats, any sightings after 1944 were presumed to be pileated woodpeckers rather than ivory-bills.

"The naysayers got so powerful," sighs Gallagher. "And what is so disappointing is the ornithologists who had contact with people who claimed to have seen ivory-bills just didn't follow up because they were afraid it would taint their careers."

Gallagher didn't have a career to taint but even when he did end up editing birding magazines, he remained fascinated enough by the story of the ivory-bill and whispered tales of occasional sightings that he decided to write a book about the species and some people's relentless quest to prove it was not yet extinct.

Then, in February 2004, one of the individuals he had contacted about a sighting emailed him a dairy entry which had been posted on a kayaking website by Gene Sparling, an avid naturalist. Sparling, who had just completed a three-day trip deep into the Arkansas swamp, reported seeing tree stumps large enough to sleep on and numerous varieties of instantly recognisable animals and birds.

"Also, and I hesitate to say this, saw a pilated [sic] woodpecker that was way too big," wrote Sparling. "The white and black colours seemed to be reversed on the wings, and the white was yellowish off-white. You birders know what is inferred, but I don't have the conviction to say."

After reading this report, Gallagher called Sparling and after speaking to him for nearly an hour believed that Sparling had indeed seen an ivory-bill.

"You can tell in five minutes if someone is a good enough observer to be reliable and then it takes a little longer to work out if they are really truthful," explains Gallagher. "The way he described it, it could only have been an ivory-bill."

A trip to where Sparling had seen the bird was hurriedly arranged and less than a week later Gallagher, Harrison and Sparling were paddling deep into an area called Bayou de View.

On the second day of their trip the now legendary sighting occurred. I ask Harrison to recall the event for what must be the thousandth time.

"Oh, it's the first time every time I tell it," he says to me as his voice begins to crack and tears fill his eyes. "Tim and I were right down this lake right here. Right here. We got down to the end of it. We look off to the right and here comes this bird flying through the trees and... I don't know what I'm looking at. It is a black bird heading towards me at an angle. And then it turned, left wing down, right wing up and it revealed that white pattern on the back of the bird and we both pointed and said 'ivory-bill!'

"All of a sudden I'm in shock. I've got tears coming out of my eyes and we're trying to get the canoe ashore and I'm trying to chase the bird through the woods and it's gone and I know I'm not going to catch up with it."
Harrison presumed that later that day or the next they would see it again and be able to photograph it. But despite another few days of searching and one more possible fleeting glimpse of the bird, they left the swamp without the proof they craved.

Standing here surrounded by thousands of wildly growing tupelos, it becomes easy to see just how hard it would be to follow any bird, let alone be able to train a camera on it should one happen to fly by.

Yet, without any photographic proof, Gallagher still thought he had to tell his boss at Cornell that he was "100 per cent certain" he had seen one.

"It was the first time two qualified observers had seen the bird simultaneously since 1944," Gallagher. explains "That made a difference. And I'm a conservative birder. I've never made a bogus call."

Gallagher's boss, John Fitzpatrick, was stunned, but accepted what Gallagher told him and realising how important a "rediscovery" this was for not only the birding world, but also for the whole environmental community, he immediately wanted to focus some of Cornell's considerable resources on commencing an organised search for the bird.

Yet Fitzpatrick also knew the potentially damaging consequences of making claims of an ivory-bill's existence without any hard evidence, so he dispatched a clandestine team of researchers to Arkansas, swore everyone to secrecy and code-named the bird "Elvis".

For 12 months they scoured the woods and while there were some further "credible" sightings, only Harrison and one other team member were able to capture on video what are believed to be ivory-billed woodpeckers (it is impossible to ascertain whether it is the same bird on both videos).

As the field season drew to a close in spring 2005, Cornell, environmental group The Nature Conservancy, several local and federal Fish and Wildlife agencies as well as the US Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, announced to the world that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered and that funds were being made available to help preserve the area in Arkansas in which the bird was believed to be living.

Since then more than £5m of federal money has been channelled into the project; three million trees are being planted; 20,000 acres of private land have been bought and added to the relevant conservation area; signs telling people how to recognise an ivory-bill have been posted at every location where people can enter the swamp; tourists have arrived from all over the world to try to catch a glimpse of the bird; and local entrepreneurs are offering "ivory-bill tours" for up to £100 a day.

Yet still no one has been able to produce a solid, clear, cleanly framed photograph or video that would make the front page of any newspaper or the "And finally... " section of the evening's television news, despite more than 20,000 search hours being logged by authorised, organised, qualified ornithologists armed with digital cameras, GPS systems and powerful binoculars. Some experts believe it may be because the species is indeed extinct.

"There are a lot of reasons to believe the ivory-bill woodpecker is an extinct species," says Richard Prum, who is the curator of ornithology at Yale University's Peabody museum.

"All of the proffered evidence, and there is not a lot, is incomplete and inconclusive," Prum tells me when I speak to him by telephone. "All of the people who have seen it fleetingly are true believers and magical things happen to true believers."

Prum claims there is no scientific reason why the bird should not be able to be found, if it is alive, and that with so many people searching the area, it could not avoid detection indefinitely. "If these people haven't produced irrefutable evidence by the end of the field season in April, then they will have a lot of explaining to do," he says.

Harrison has his own theories as to why the bird is proving so elusive: "I think there are too many people searching at this point," he says. "This is a very wary bird and so going from the hotel to the swamp every day and visiting doesn't work. I think you have to live out there for a while. Also the area is so huge."

An ivory-bill can reportedly cover more than 12 miles a day in search of food and the Big Woods in Arkansas spread over 750 square miles - an area slightly larger than the whole of Greater London. "There may be no more than two or three ivory-bills living here," Harrison adds, making the search the equivalent of looking for "a flying needle in a haystack."

Searchers have so far identified 375 possible nesting sites but have only observed 200 of those with remote cameras (none were found to be ivory-bill nests).

As we reach a hidden lake deep in the swamp where several sightings have been reported, we come across a rather surreal sight. Halfway up a tree on the other side of the still lake we can see a man's head. He appears to be sitting in a large basket attached to the tree.

"That's one of the volunteers," explains Gallagher. This year, funding from Cornell of more than £400,000 is available for 21 full-time staff to search full time for ivory-bills as well as for the recruitment and deployment of over 100 volunteers, a dozen hi-tech remote cameras and 30 autonomous recording devices. John Kemp, the man in the tree, is one of those volunteers and he is spending all day, every day for the next two weeks watching from his tree basket for any sign of an ivory-bill. Harrison shouts across and asks if he has seen anything. "No," he shouts back.

We stand quietly in the swamp for a while and watch and wait. We see otters and beavers and turtles and three other species of woodpecker, but no sign of Elvis.

I don't doubt that Gallagher, Harrison and Sparling believe they saw an ivory-bill - they have too much integrity to lie and should have too much experience to be mistaken - but its whereabouts in the Big Woods and why a nesting site can't be found remain a mystery.

We decide to call it a day. As we wander back through the ash-grey trees I ask Gallagher what he hopes will happen in the coming months.

"I hope we get the most solid evidence imaginable," says Gallagher. "But that's what we wanted to happen last year and it didn't." Until it does, the swamps of Arkansas will continue to be filled with confederates or dunces, depending on who you believe.

'The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker' by Tim Gallagher (Houghton Mifflin, $25), is available from www.amazon.co.uk

Flying miracles

More supposedly extinct birds that have startled ornithologists

Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi) This species, previously only known from a few examples collected in the 19th century, made a dramatic reappearance in Papua New Guinea late last year.

Edward's pheasant (Lophura edwardsi) After last being seen in central Vietnam in 1928, it survived several wars and the scrutiny of half a dozen French expeditions before reappearing in 1998.

Indian forest owlet (Athene blewitti) If there was a prize for hiding from biologists, twitchers, collectors and tourists, this diminutive bird would surely win. In 1996, it was rediscovered after 113 years in hiding.

Chinese crested tern (Thalasseus bernsteini) Thought to have become extinct when specimen hunters killed 21 of them in 1938, four pairs popped up in 2001 on Taiwan's Matsu Island. It's hoped the presence of 18,000 troops and a missile base at its breeding ground will deter collectors this time around.

Aleutian Canada Goose (Branta canadensis leucopareia) In 1967, numbering fewer than 500, these birds were declared to be endangered. They then disappeared completely for 25 years but subsequently made a dramatic comeback, and now number some 40,000 animals. Alistair Crighton

news.independent.co.uk/environment/article346065.ece

[another specialist]

melanie said:

NewScientist.com - NEWSFLASH

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ivory-billed woodpecker's return - a case of mistaken identity?

In April 2005, the apparent rediscovery of the iconic bird, believed
to be extinct for 60 years, created huge excitement among
conservationists. The US government moved quickly to appoint a
recovery team and committed more than $10 million to try to rescue
the species.

But now a new paper, after scrutinising the evidence, says claims of
the woodpecker's reappearance may not be justified.

See the original video evidence of the woodpecker flying in the
swamps of eastern Arkansas, US, and follow the debate, here:
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8837

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Maybe it's an ivory-billed woodpecker, but he thinks it's just a bad video
Could have been a different bird, illustrator says
By RICHARD DEGENER Staff Writer, [phone]
Published: Friday, March 24, 2006
Updated: Friday, March 24, 2006

CAPE MAY POINT — David Sibley wants to be wrong.

He wants the bird he sees in a grainy four-second video, called by some the avian equivalent of the Zapruder film that documented the Kennedy assassination, to be an ivory-billed woodpecker.

But each time Sibley looks at the video, all he sees is the more common pileated woodpecker. The ivory-billed was last seen in 1944, and before the video, most assumed it was extinct.

Sibley still hopes there is an ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas, Louisiana or some other Southern state, but he just isn't convinced it's been found.

“I want to know an ivory-billed is there. I hope it's there. The best way for someone to resolve this whole debate is to get a better photograph,” Sibley said.

A famous bird illustrator who got his start here at this birding mecca from 1980 to 1999, and now lives in Concord, Mass., isn't the first to question findings of the prestigious Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. He just may be the most respected.

Sibley is so well-respected that people listen, and they read. The March issue of Science magazine outlines the arguments of Sibley and three of his colleagues.

It was Cornell Laboratory President John Fitzpatrick who shocked the birding world last year when he publicly announced “conclusive proof” that the ivory-billed had been rediscovered.

Kayaker Gene Sparling saw the bird Feb. 11., 2004, on a bayou in Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, and this led to a search that yielded sightings, sound recordings and the grainy video.

Tim Gallagher, birding author affiliated with Cornell, called the bird “unmistakably an ivory-bill.” In April 2005, Science magazine presented Cornell's stance, arguing the size, wing patterns at rest and in flight, plumage and coloring prove it's an ivory-bill.

Sibley initially accepted the report “without question.” He was as excited as everybody else in the birding world. Sibley spent 25 years birding in the southeastern swamps hoping to see one and immediately headed south for an eight-day camping trip in Arkansas.

Sibley did not see any ivory-bills on the May 2005 trip but saw many pileated woodpeckers in action. He was stunned when he realized the four-second video was likely the smaller but similar-looking pileated woodpecker.

As Sibley studied the video he found more problems with the identification. He took it apart frame by frame, and acknowledges some of them look like an ivory-bill while in others the bird looks like a pileated. The video is so blurry it enhances white coloring and this, he believes is leading to part of the identification issue. He said the underside of the wings clearly shows a pileated. The way a bird's wing moves in flight is part of the debate. He said the sound recordings prove nothing.

Sibley describes his feelings on his Web site when he realized the video did not prove America's largest woodpecker had been rediscovered.

“I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I looked again, trying to refute my own conclusion, and I wept as the realization set in that the woodpecker was fading back into a ghostly uncertainty …”

Sibley did not want to go public and joined some other skeptics in trying to “resolve it quietly” with Cornell's Fitzpatrick. He noted the April 2005 announcement was made as fact before any scientific review. In New Jersey, rare sightings go before a committee, but there is nothing like this in Arkansas.

“The Cornell people listened but weren't interested. They didn't change their approach or public stance,” Sibley said.

Birders were becoming increasing skeptical but remained silent.

“They were afraid to talk about it. It made everybody nervous. It's depressing the woodpecker would slip back into the twilight,” Sibley said.

Reluctant and nervous is how Sibley describes himself as he decided to go public. The ivory-billed resurgence has led to a lot of good things, including millions of dollars in federal money to save habitat.

In Brinkley, Ark., you can now get an ivory-billed burger, stay at the Ivory-billed Inn and for $25, get a unique haircut with a red-white-and-black pompadour.

Sibley himself has cashed in on the “lord god bird,” as it was commonly known due to the reaction it brought to those who saw it. Sibley has painted the bird for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy.

Still, he said it had to be scientifically proven to exist.

“The ivory bill might be there instead of is there. That's a big difference. I'm not satisfied going on belief and opinion,” Sibley said.

Some are. Peter Dunne, director of the New Jersey Audubon Society's bird observatory here on Lake Lily, is satisfied. Dunne, who just returned from an Ivory-Billed Festival in Arkansas, is a good friend of Sibley. He bases his acceptance not on the video but on the birders who said they saw it.

“They recognized and identified the bird. I'm not a scientist. I'm just a birder. If they don't find this bird all it proves is this bird is not there now,” Dunne said.

But which bird isn't there now? Is it an ivory-billed, or a pileated?

www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/local/capemay/story/6070660p-6070282c.html

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Arkansas bird controversy is all about money

By WILLY ZIMMER
Star-Tribune staff writer

The headline in the Associated Press story said something along the lines of, "Feathers fly in endangered bird flap." That was the first of a flock of bird puns hatched by a scientist who's ruffling feathers in Arkansas.

Puns aside, some bird experts are casting doubts -- or "pecking away" as the AP reporter said -- at the reported 2005 sighting in Arkansas of an ivory-billed woodpecker. The woodpecker was believed to be extinct, until video and audio recordings taken last year seemed to confirm it still existed. The apparent resurrection from extinction caused a great deal of excitement in the wildlife and conservation communities.

Then science and its duty to doubt spoke with an ugly beak.

"The controversy took wing in (a recent) issue of the journal Science," the AP reported, "with one set of researchers arguing that the bird videotaped last year probably was a common pileated woodpecker and another group stoutly defending the identification as an ivory-bill."

David A. Sibley, who is a bird illustrator, headed the naysayers. Sibley said he made a trip to the Big Woods section of Arkansas and failed to confirm the sighting. A further review of the videotape led him to believe the identification "rests on mistaken interpretations of the bird's posture."

That riled up a bunch of folks, including Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

"The fact that these skeptics can't find it says more about their bird-hunting ability than the accuracy of the experts' opinions," Huckabee said.

Ouch! So why would a scientific opinion bring out the worst in one of Arkansas' finest?

Because this little ol' woodpecker has become big business. The AP reported the search for the woodpecker has become a tourist boom, with business "up an estimated 30 percent and shops selling woodpecker memorabilia" near the Big Woods area. One town -- Brinkley, Ark. -- held a woodpecker celebration in February.

That confirms an opinion I've long held. Endangered, and now previously-extinct, species are big business. They provide a living for lots of folks, from the conservation community to tax-supported biologists to entrepreneurs that run wildlife tours.

Are there really ivory-billed woodpeckers still flying around the Arkansas swamps? Somebody will say "Yes," as long as there's money to be made.

Marching in May

Last week's centerpiece for Open Spaces was a story on volksmarching in Wyoming. One fact requires a clarification: According to Mary Lou and Bobby Marcum, the volksmarch season begins at Hot Springs State Park on May 29, not April 1 as was listed on the Wyoming State Trails Web site (http://wyotrails.state.wy.us/trails/volks.htm) and reported in the story.

Volksmarch 2006 officially opens May 1 at Edness Kimball Wilkins, Keyhole and Guernsey state parks; as well as Fort Bridger Historic Site.

Four other sites, including Hot Springs State Park, begin marching May 29.

And in D.C. ...

A couple of notable happenings from the land of Lincoln monuments and bedrooms. Outgoing Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton announced the formation of a new federal advisory Sporting Conservation Council to help give outdoor recreationists more input into policy decisions.

Wyoming's sportsmen and sportswomen will have a voice. Council members include former Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director John Baughman; as well as the directors of hunting/conservation organizations like the National Wild Turkey Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Boone and Crockett Club and Ducks Unlimited.

"We wanted to find a way of institutionalizing the role of sportsmen and women in the decision-making process at Interior," Norton said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also began interviewing sportsmen and sportswomen this week for its 5-year survey of how people recreate outdoors.

According to a press release from the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, 85,000 households will be contacted by the Census Bureau from late March-May and September-October of 2006, and January-February 2007.

The Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation uses the data to publish a report on the economic impact of outdoor activities.

Assistant features editor Willy Zimmer can be reached at [phone] or [e-mail]

www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2006/03/30/features/open_spaces/0c70fb7bcf98a0538725714000267885.txt

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Does ivory-bill exist, or not exist? That is the questionBy Sandy Bauers
Inquirer Staff Writer
Deep inside the Academy of Natural Sciences, Nate Rice turns a key and the doors of a hermetically sealed cabinet soundlessly swing open.

Carefully, he slides out a tray of birds, each on its back, legs tucked, neck outstretched.

They are ivory-billed woodpeckers, echoes of a time when their species proliferated in our Southern swamps. Now, their neighbors are the passenger pigeon, the Labrador duck, the Carolina parakeet - all extinct.

But if Cornell University's renowned Lab of Ornithology is right, scientists will have to change the status of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The "Lazarus bird," as some now call it, may not be extinct after all.

The announcement last April that the bird had been spotted - more than once - in the Big Woods of Arkansas could signal the greatest ornithological discovery of our time.

Or the most disappointing case of mistaken identity.

Meanwhile, it's the biggest ornithological debate going.

Were the birds spotted just common pileated woodpeckers? Last month in the journal Science, bird-guide author David Sibley couldn't rule that out.

Or were they really ivory-bills, large and stunning enough to earn the nickname "Lord God" bird, because of the common exclamation when people saw one? (Said to be the third-largest woodpecker in the world, they stand 18 to 20 inches with a wingspan up to 31 inches and a weight of 16 to 20 ounces.)

A now-famous four-second video shot in 2004 in Arkansas is as frustrating as it is tantalizing.

Its clearest image is someone's hand. Then, in the fuzzy distance, a brief flapping, a flash of white.

Doubters say there is better film of Bigfoot.

Researchers have dissected the video and several audio recordings, analyzing color patterns on the wings, calculating the speed of the wingbeats, comparing sound spectrographs.

Cornell has funded two seasons of intense searching in the Big Woods, chalking up more sightings. What they really want now are irrefutable photos.

And, please, not just one bird - what good is that? - but a few breeding pairs.

Birders are riveted.

Last Saturday, a Bucks County Audubon Society talk by Jim Fitzpatrick, a Minnesota nature center director who says he saw the bird, drew double the usual number of participants.

This Saturday, author Tim Gallagher, who was in the midst of researching his book, The Grail Bird, when, he says, he saw one himself, will speak at North Philadelphia's Wagner Free Institute of Science, which has two ivory-bill specimens in its collection.

Director Susan Glassman expects to fill the 500 seats in the Victorian-era lecture hall, noting that the talk will be reminiscent of the 19th century, when scientists wowed audiences with tales of expeditions that blazed new scientific trails.

A recent week took Gallagher, editor of Cornell's Living Bird magazine, from New York to San Diego to Florida to Connecticut. People "want to hear it from someone who saw the bird," he said.

On April 28, Kenneth Rosenberg, Cornell's director of conservation science, will speak at New Jersey Audubon's $125-a-plate annual fund-raiser.

Several area birders have joined the search in Arkansas, volunteering for two-week stints to wade through the muck, dodging poison ivy and cottonmouths, and not just because they think the science is important.

"I wanted to see it, pure and simple," said Art McMorris, a Bala Cynwyd freelance ornithologist and retired neuroscientist.

Harry Armistead, a Philadelphia librarian and amateur ornithologist, was "electrified" at last year's announcements. He spent two weeks of his vacation this year to help search.

Neither may say whether he saw the bird; Cornell exacts a promise of secrecy until it makes its own announcements.

Whatever happens, Gallagher intends to go back, be part of it.

"Some people say, 'I'd love to see it just once in my life,' " he said of the ivory-bill. "I tell you, it's just not enough."

Once common in the cypress swamps of the South, ivory-bills declined because loggers clear-cut their habitat. By the 1890s, the bird's demise was hastened by the very people who should have cared most: naturalists. They wanted to collect specimens before it was too late.

One Academy specimen dates from 1894, when A.T. Wayne shot it near the Wacissa River, in Florida's Panhandle.

The last undisputed sighting was in 1944. Since then, others have claimed to have seen the bird - in Florida, in Louisiana, in Arkansas. But they were met with doubt, even ridicule.

Gallagher understands the skepticism; "it feels too good to be true." But he contends that scientists' unwillingness to believe - and investigate - may have hurt the bird's chances of having its habitat protected.

Farmers are now offering some fields, cleared decades ago in the soybean boom, for conservation. Since 1982, says Jay Harrod, of the Nature Conservancy in Little Rock, 50,000 acres of habitat have been reforested.

In March, the Audubon Society cast its lot with Cornell and listed the ivory-bill among America's 10 most-endangered birds.

Yet as much as the Academy's Rice would like to believe in the sightings, he's unconvinced.

"That's a life that was lost," he says wistfully, lightly brushing the feathers of a specimen with his fingers. But he also speaks of its "immortality" because of its use to science.

His hope is that, someday, someone will find a feather in the Arkansas swamp, and a DNA match with an Academy specimen will end the debate.

Until then, they keep looking.

Woodpecker Talks

Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird and editor of Living Bird magazine, will speak at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, 1700 W. Montgomery Ave., near Temple University in North Philadelphia. Open house noon to 4 p.m. Donation: $8. Phone: [phone]. www.wagnerfreeinstitute.org.

Kenneth Rosenberg, director of conservation science with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, will speak at an "Evening for the Birds" April 28 at Fair Winds, 185 Madisonville Rd., Basking Ridge, N.J. $125 a person. Phone: [phone]. www.njaudubon.org/centers,

click on Scherman-

Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary.

For information about the woodpecker and the search for it, visit: http:// www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory or www.nature.org/ ivorybill.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

Peckergate: Ivory-billed Woodpecker Still Extinct -- Pileated Woodpecker misidentified in Arkansas as elsewhere
Incompetence, Religion and Hoax
The latest Ivory-billed Woodpecker episode is over. It isn't there now, and it wasn't there in 2004 or 2005. We've been fooled, but not everybody is staying fooled.

There is no credible evidence that the North American subspecies of Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis survived after the demise of the Singer Tract birds in the 1940s. What can only be another routine case of misidentification of the common Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus in good Pileated but poor Ivorybill habitat in Arkansas has been promoted as the latest Ivorybill "rediscovery". It has received widespread publicity as "fact" thanks to the unscientific cooperation of Science magazine. Apparently Science only considered the quantity of dubious evidence cumulated by the "rediscoverers" rather than the total absence of any proof that would persuade a competent state rare bird records committee. The article claiming a rediscovery should be retroactively rejected by Science and withdrawn until the proponents meet their burden of proof, which cannot be satisfied with sight records by dudes and stringers, blurry video of a Pileated Woodpecker, and tape recordings of Blue Jays.

Twitchers have been far more skeptical of the latest "rediscovery" than Science or the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. They know from experience to distrust incredible reports made by people other than well-established, expert birders -- who never see Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. They also require indisputable evidence to count a rare bird.

For a tongue-in-cheek review of similar Pileated Woodpecker misidentifications between 1966 and 1983, based entirely on actual reports, see:

The Little-Known Status and Distribution of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Strix nebulosa (G. Stuart Keith). The Auklet (1983).

Since the publication of Jerome Jackson's article in January, skepticism has been spreading down from the top. When the subject comes up at bird club meetings, the most respected birders are dismissing the Arkansas Ivorybill as a mistake or a hoax. When others see the leading birders in agreement, the conversation turns from how to see an Ivorybill to what can be done to set the record straight. The same thing will be happening at rare bird stakeouts and on pelagic trips. What must have seemed like a brilliant coup for the Cornell Lab is rapidly turning into a nightmare. [See: Hunter R. Rawlings, III, Interim President of Cornell University, lauds Ivory-billed Woodpecker "rediscovery" in speech denouncing "intelligent design" as junk science.]

Rather than conceding that the Ivorybill "rediscovery" was based on erroneous sight records and a misidentified video and returning grant money taken away from worthwhile conservation projects, management at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and their allies have been working overtime to keep this lucrative hoax alive. They're now in the bunker, lobbing stinkbombs at Jerome Jackson, David Sibley and anyone else who threatens their finances and careers. They also seem to be calling in favors. Thus, rather than standing up to the abuse of bird conservation for publicity and profit, the American Bird Conservancy, a small organization far down the pecking order for government grants, has issued a ridiculous statement attacking Jackson. (Comments.) Consequently, it's not surprising that most people dependent on ornithology or conservation for their paychecks have been afraid to take on the powerful interests behind the Ivorybill hoax. However, a few whistleblowers have surfaced anonymously in the comments on Tom Nelson's Ivory-Bill Skeptic blog, which is the best place to keep up with developments in this scandalous affair.

17 March 2006: Comment on the Fitzpatrick article by David A. Sibley, Louis R. Bevier, Michael A. Patten & Chris S. Elphick. Science Vol. 311 no. 5767 p. 1555. "We reanalyzed video presented as confirmation that an ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) persists in Arkansas (Fitzpatrick et al., Reports, 3 June 2005, p. 1460). None of the features described as diagnostic of the ivory-billed woodpecker eliminate a normal pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus)."

24 January 2006: The longer the search goes on without confirmation, the more skeptical I become. While I found the video unconvincing, as birds often appear much lighter or darker depending on light reflections, the double rap tapes made by remote recording devices and disclosed just as leading ornithologists were preparing to publish a paper questioning the latest Ivory-billed Woodpecker claim at first seemed conclusive. Now, however, Jerome Jackson has pointed out in his article in the January 2006 Auk that the devices were placed near roads and campgrounds and not necessarily in the "deep woods". It's conceivable that the recordings are of Campephilus double raps broadcast from a tape recorder either by someone trying to locate birds or someone trying to fool the searchers. In addition, Jackson, a leading authority on North American woodpeckers, believes that the drums may have been given by a different species of woodpecker. The "kent" calls recorded could have been made by Blue Jays, or as Jackson suggests, with a single-reed, woodwind mouthpiece. While I continue to hope that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers will be located, there still is no solid evidence that the Ivorybill did not become extinct about 50 to 60 years ago. Neotropical Campephilus woodpeckers are noisy and easy to locate, and historical reports show that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was likewise quite conspicuous. The inability of a large team of searchers to find one in a patch of marginal habitat strongly suggests that this is simply another case of misidentification of the common Pileated Woodpecker, or as twitchers would say, stringing. (A "stringer" originally was a birder who would report a string of questionable birds that nobody else could find, ie, "I had an Aquatic Warbler, then I had a Rose-colored Starling, then I had an Ortolan Bunting, etc.")


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UPDATE 20 January 2006: Paid IBWO searchers in Texas. This is a goofy waste of taxpayers' money. There is no credible evidence whatsoever that Ivory-billed Woodpecker survived in Texas after the early 20th Century. I wonder what worthwhile conservation projects lost funding to support this boondoggle.


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UPDATE: Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis): Hope and the interfaces of science, conservation and politics by Jerome A. Jackson. Auk 123(1): 1-15 (January 2006)(pdf). Just the facts, without the religion. The "rediscovery" has fallen apart like a house of cards.

Articles about Jackson's paper: "Ivory Bill Report is Called 'Faith-based Ornithology'" by James Gorman, New York Times, 24 January 2006. The Trustees of Cornell University must not have been pleased to see the headline about "faith-based ornithology" in the New York Times. It risks becoming known as the Bob Jones University of the North if someone doesn't pull the plug on this ridiculous episode soon.

"An Ivory-bill Skeptic Speaks Out" by Chuck Hagner. Birder's World, April 2006.


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UPDATE 8 November 2005: Possible female Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis sighting at Copper Canyon, Chihuahua, Mexico! Observed near Divisadero on the north rim. Details are in a message posted on 16 November on the Mexico-Birding Yahoo! group. Most birders had given up on the Imperial Woodpecker due to the wholesale destruction of old-growth pine forests in western Mexico. Thick-billed Parrots were seen in the vicinity last year. There is no suitable breeding habitat for Imperial Woodpecker in the vicinity. See "Is the larger, grander cousin of our Ivory-billed Woodpecker - the Imperial Woodpecker - still flying in western Mexico? By Matt Mendenhall. Birder's World, December 2005. Since the last fragments of old growth forest in the highlands of western Mexico have only recently been destroyed, a few, possibly non-breeding, imperialis may survive and may be traveling substantial distances to forage. An Imperial Woodpecker sighting is much more plausible than an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting.


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UPDATE 25 August 2005: Possible Ivory-billed Woodpecker calls and drums taped in Arkansas are now available online on the Cornell website. The most persuasive cut thus far is the February 5, 2005 recording of three double raps. The double rap tapes seem to be the best evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker may still exist, but as Jerome Jackson points out, there are a number of other possible explanations, including the possibility that remote recorders picked up playback of tapes of other Campephilus or that the drums were given by other species of woodpeckers. There is no evidence at all that birds have survived anywhere else, including Cuba.


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UPDATE 25 August 2005. The issue of North American Birds that arrived today, volume 59 number 2, includes a superb Ivory-billed Woodpecker Special Section. The lead article is K.V. Rosenberg, R.W. Rohrbaugh & M. Lammertink, An overview of Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) sightings in eastern Arkansas in 2004-2005 (pages 198-206). It includes details of alleged sightings along the Cache River, referenced on a map, as well as photographs of large woodpecker cavities in the area and photos of a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpecker decoys carved by Gene Sparling. Subscriptions to North American Birds may be ordered online through Amazon.com here.


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UPDATE 2 August 2005. Vindication for Ivory-billed Woodpecker and Its Fans. By James Gorman & Andrew C. Revkin. The New York Times (which covers science as if it were a football game). Cornell recently produced a tape of double rap drums and nasal "kent" calls made in the White River National Wildlife Refuge, south of the Cache River swamp where a white-winged woodpecker was seen and videotaped, to the scientists who were preparing to publish an article questioning the claimed Ivory-billed Woodpecker rediscovery. They have withdrawn the article and now accept the record. "Dr. Prum said the double raps appeared to be from a pair of ivory bills communicating with each other, one close and one far away. 'I'm thinking about when I should head down to Arkansas,' he said." [So if you too were fooled, take comfort in the fact that one of the leading experts also was fooled.] The tapes are available online, and as noted above, the February 5, 2005 recording of three double raps was most persuasive evidence of the continued existence of Ivory-billed Woodpecker (until Jerome Jackson persuasively rebutted it), but not conclusive proof. Those claiming that Ivory-billed Woodpecker still exists have thus far failed to meet their burden of proof.

The search has moved from the narrow Cache River gallery forest to the much more extensive White River system, where the new tapes were made. If Ivory-billed Woodpecker survived there for 60+ years until February 2005, in all likelihood it is still there in 2006. What Bill Oddie calls the "two bird theory" is not going to work.


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On February 11, 2004, Gene M. Sparling III of Hot Springs, Arkansas, observed what he thought was a single male Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis (but almost certainly was a Pileated Woodpecker) while on a canoe trip in Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, south of Dixie, Arkansas and just north of I40, the highway between Memphis and Little Rock. He posted a detailed report on the Arkansas Canoe Club Message Board, and Tim Gallagher of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology was sufficiently impressed to arrange to have Gene take him and Bobby Harrison to the place where Gene had seen the bird. After one night out, they saw a bird which they assert was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker along a bayou through cypress and tupelo swamp forest. (Harrison claims to have seen Ivory-billed Woodpecker five times!) There have been at least six additional claimed sightings since February 2004, the most recent on February 14, 2005. (Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Details about what the search team saw and heard.) Double rap drums were heard on three occasions in series ranging from three to 18 double raps: 9 November 2004, 14 February 2005 & 7 March 2005. On 9 November 2004, the drums were coming from two different directions, "presenting the impression that two birds were involved. However, the possibility that a single bird was flying back and forth, alternatively drumming from two different positions could not be ruled out." (Supplementary online material.) The species producing the double rap drums was not identified.

Each sighting has been of a single male bird -- all possibly the same bird -- within a two mile radius of the initial observation. Whether it is an Ivorybill or a Pileated remains in dispute, but there is no concrete evidence that anything other than Pileated Woodpeckers have been observed. James Tanner wrote that "Ivory-billed Woodpeckers usually travel in pairs, at least that is the number most often observed. Single individuals seen are usually unmated birds." (James Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Research Report No. 1 of the National Audubon Society, October 1942, page 60.) In light of Tanner's observations, it's possible that if in the highly improbable event that two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers were indeed heard in November 2004, both were unmated males.

On April 28, 2005, the US Fish & Wildlife Service issued a press release about the "discovery" and about steps that will be taken to protect the bird(s). A 5,000 acre Managed Access Area has been established. (Map - pdf). Access to this area will be limited to researchers. (The disputed woodpecker almost certainly ranges outside of the restricted area.)

Tanner failed to visit this area during his survey of possible Ivorybill sites in the 1930s. The only site in Arkansas that he surveyed was White River Waterfowl Refuge in Arkansas and Desha Counties which is in the same river system directly south of the rediscovery locality. He commented on the White River Refuge as follows: "Ivory-bills were once recorded from this area, and there are a few virgin tracts of sweet gum and oak timber but too small and scattered to make really good Ivory-bill territory. I found no indications of the birds still being there." (Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, page 25.)

The previous last known site for Ivorybills was the Singer Tract (owned by the Singer Corporation) in Madison Parish, northern Louisiana just west of the Mississippi and about 175 miles south of the Cache River observation site. Over the objections of the National Audubon Society, the old growth forests in the Singer Tract were logged during in the early 1940s using German prisoners of war as forced laborers (subsidized logging). President Roosevelt specifically refused to act to protect the last known Ivorybills. It's possible but highly unlikely that the birds from the Singer Tract population may have moved north to Arkansas after their habitat was destroyed. The area of the Singer Tract where Allen et al. studied Ivorybills is now a completely treeless soybean plantation.

There is so little virgin forest in the area of the Arkansas observations that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers would have to travel considerable distances to forage. In an email dated 30 April 2005, Timothy Barksdale reported:

"After a day long intensive hike through Big Oak Tree State Park [Missouri - about 200 miles NE of the Cache River site] and a follow up conversation with Martjan Lammertink, I can state that peeling of Sweet Gum bark done was done in a manner consistent with the characteristic methods used by what we feel is certainly Ivory-billed Woodpecker has been photographically documented in Big Oak Tree State Park. There were two other trees that were recently dead which showed characteristic peeling of bark about 50 feet up. The number of peeled trees was not large throughout the park but this is not found in Pileated only areas."

Although Ivorybills in the Mississippi drainage were not known historically to forage in pine woods, like birds in Florida, it is possible that the Arkansas Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (if they exist) may visit pine plantations, where trees are often killed by fire and disease. If there are pine forests near the sites where a disputed bird has been observed, killing some standing pines on a periodic schedule to provide an additional food source that could be easily monitored would seem like a sound strategy. (Ivorybill conservation in southern Florida may have failed in part because only cypress swamps were protected but not the old pine forests that provided a reliable food supply.)

More Links
David Sibley's field guide page on Ivory-billed Woodpecker (pdf)

John W. Fitzpatrick et al. Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America. Science Express (pdf). It should be called Fitzpatrick's Folly.

Supporting Online Material, including pages from field notebooks (pdf). Quantity without quality.

Video about the "rediscovery", including David Luneau's film of a Pileated Woodpecker flying away.

ibwo.org - David Luneau's website about his participation in the search for the Ivorybill, his misidentified Pileated Woodpecker video made on April 25, 2004, and remote motion-detecting cameras.

Timeline of the Ivory-bill Search

Ivorybill.org - Big Woods Conservation Partnership

Rediscovering the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Cornell is going to have some 'splainin' to do.

Hunt and Peck. The Ivory-billed Woopecker isn't extinct after all. Just darn hard to spot. By William Booth. The Washington Post, 6 July 2005. "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was concerned enough about a birder invasion that the refuge manager posted a couple armed officers at the Highway 17 bridge, the closest put-in for a canoe and smack dab in the middle of the two-mile stretch where the sightings have occurred, to keep the hordes out of the restricted area. Alas, it was not to be: The birders have (mostly) stayed away." This demonstrates how poorly the USFWS bureaucrats understand serious birders, birding, and presumed threats posed by birders. The chances of encountering an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the vicinity of the 2004 sightings would be minuscule even if it actually existed. Moreover, birders have always been much more skeptical of the Arkansas Ivorybill claim than Science magazine or the mainstream media. They know that dudes and stringers "see" Ivorybills regularly throughout the U.S., and that the media made similar claims about the obviously bogus "sightings" in the Pearl River area of Southeastern Louisiana. If some established expert birder were to report seeing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, twitchers around the world would be checking airline schedules to Little Rock. But expert birders never see Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. [Non-birders reading this need to understand that birding expertise bears no relation to academic accomplishments, publications, or professional appointments. One doesn't become a great birder by taking classes, passing exams, or writing books and articles. Some of the world's finest birders never took a course in biology and certainly would not put up with the mind-numbing drudgery and anti-scientific political correctness prevalent in modern academia.]

In the absence of a photo, a tape of a bird seen calling or drumming, or a tape of the same bird drumming and calling, there is no proof that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker survives. Given the choice of spending a week or two in Arkansas with little prospect of seeing the disputed bird or going birding somewhere else where there are numerous potential life birds, almost every birder would select the latter. Furthermore, if twitchers went to Arkansas, observed the disputed bird and positively identified it as a Pileated, Cornell no doubt would invoke the "two bird theory", ie, you saw a different bird than our people saw, to keep the episode alive for another round of federal funding.

Putting armed officers on the Hwy 17 bridge is at least as idiotic as sending camouflaged National Guardsmen with M16s into Grand Central Terminal. All the feds are going to accomplish is to alienate local outdoorsmen, whose cooperation would be most beneficial on other conservation projects. The money spent on salaries for armed cops to harass (missing) birders would be better spent on habitat protection and education.

Extinct? After 60 Years, Woodpecker Begs to Differ. By David Brown and Eric Pianin, The Washington Post, 29 April 2005.

The Birds of North America Online: Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis. By Jerome A. Jackson. BNA No. 711.

Edwin M. Hasbrouck. The Present Status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). Auk 8:174-186 (1891) (pdf).

Julie Zickefoose's article & superb illustrations

No more hope for the [Cuban] Ivory-billed Woodpecker. By Martjan Lammertink. Cotinga 3, February 1995.

Painting of Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Pedro Regalado from the cover of Cotinga 11.

Português: Pica-pau considerado extinto nos EUA reaparece. Estadao.com.br.

James T. Tanner. The Decline and Present Status of the Imperial Woodpecker (Campephilus imperialis) of Mexico. Auk 81:74-81 (1964) (pdf).

E.W. Nelson. The Imperial Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus imperialis (Gould). Auk 15:217-223 (1898) (pdf).

World's largest woodpecker feared extinct. BirdLife International, 11 July 2003. (Campephilus imperialis).

Of the woodpeckers in the genus Campephilus, apparently only principalis and maybe imperialis have/had highly specialized food requirements centered on recently dead or dying trees. For an example of another feeding strategy found in Campephilus, see Roberto P. Schlatter and Pablo Vergara, Magellanic Woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus) sap feeding and its role in the Tierra del Fuego forest bird assemblage. Journal of Ornithology 146(2):188-192 (2005). (Abstract).

By the same authors - Magellanic woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus) abundance and foraging in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Journal of Ornithology 145(4):343-351 (2004). (Abstract)

[another specialist]

melanie said:

New Search Launched in Georgia for Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

By Devon Pendleton


April 11, 2006 A new chapter in the ongoing saga over the disputed existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker unfolded last week, as the Georgia Department of Natural Resources launched a search in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to try and confirm whether the elusive species of bird is in fact alive.

Last week, biologists set out on a month-long hunt in the northwestern portion of the 402,000-acre Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The last confirmed sighting of the bird in the Okefenokee Swamp occurred in 1942, the AP report added. The biologists plan to study the habitat for signs of ivory-bill activity, including tree cavities, foraging marks, and its distinctive honking call.

Considered by some to be America's most resplendent bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, with its majestic wingspan and bright red cockade, was a common sight in the southeastern U.S. forests in the 19th century. Sightings began to dwindle, however, in the intervening decades as lumbering and swamp-clearing decimated their habitat. In 1967, the ivory-bill was declared extirpated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from all regions of the United States.

Then, last February, a man kayaking in Arkansas' Cache River National Wildlife Refuge spotted what he believed to be an ivory-bill. Researchers from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology joined him the following week where they once again sighted the bird, this time catching it on video for proof. Conservationists and birders everywhere were stunned and thrilled... after 60 years of absence, the ivory-bill had staged a most unlikely comeback.

Or maybe not. A year later, a peer-reviewed article published in America's premier scientific journal, Science, by esteemed ornithologist David Sibley soundly refuted the sightings. Sibley reasoned that enthusiasm over the potential existence of an ivory-bill led the researchers to mistake the rare bird for the similar, but smaller, pileated woodpecker. In response, the Cornell Ornithology Lab published an article defending their claims and their solid video evidence.

In an attempt to settle the issue once and for all, several southeastern states (including Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina) initiated searches for the ivory-bill in their forests and swamp regions.

According to Tom MacKenzie, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Southeast Region, every state is conducting their respective searches independently, but all have the same hopes of finding encouraging signs of the ivory-bill.

"Each state is approaching [the search] differently, and each is working with different budgets and different technologies," MacKenzie told Outside Online. "Though the Georgia search has just been launched, other searches in Arkansas and South Carolina are winding down now that the leaves are beginning to come out, limiting good viewing opportunities."

According to the AP, the biologists on the Georgia team will visit areas where logging has not occurred in 80 years and where ivory-bills have been spotted in the past, including Minnies Island, Cravens Hammock, Hickory Hammock, and Pine Island.

Despite the efforts, MacKenzie believes the chances of a sighting in Georgia are slim. However, he is confident that the ivory-bill does exist, somewhere in the greater Southeast.

"I've seen the Cornell video and I've witnessed the emphasis the whole Cornell team has put on their substantial proof," he said. "It's been out of sight for 60 years, but this sighting could be the tip of the iceberg. There have probably been many sightings over the years but people haven't been prepared to fully defend their claim so they haven't formally come forward. I'm pretty confident this Cornell sighting is legitimate."

[another specialist]

melanie said:

The Thing with Feathers
Is it a bird or a haunting memory?
Wells Tower tracks an uncertain resurrection in the big woods of Arkansas

By Wells Tower


IF YOU WERE THE LAST BIRD OF YOUR SPECIES, looking for a comfortable place to evade extinction, the view flying over northern Monroe County, Arkansas, would probably not tempt you to touch down. You'd see abandoned trailer homes with saplings growing through their windows; asbestos-shingle shacks with discarded cars and appliances sinking into their lawns; rice fields sectioned into rectangular ponds like the plastic lagoons in a TV-dinner tray; and huge, insectile central-pivot irrigators patrolling oceans of soil where thousand-year-old cypress trees once stood.

Yet Bayou de View—a spit of hardwood jungle here at the uppermost tip of Arkansas's 550,000-acre Big Woods, smack-dab between Little Rock and Memphis—is where the world's rarest avis, the ivory-billed woodpecker, has reemerged more than half a century after ornithological authorities pronounced it dead. Seen from above, Bayou de View looks about as primeval as a planter of ficus trees at a shopping mall. Below the treetops, though, the terrain looks less like eastern Arkansas and more like rural Mordor. The water, which is the color of beef au jus, flows in labyrinthine meanders boiling with toothy gar and cottonmouths as stout as a man's wrist. The forest is an endless gray weft of cypress and tupelo trunks that reduces the vista to nil. In the warmer months, when the trees haven't yet molted, trying to spot an ivorybill back here is roughly as rewarding as tracking a dust mite through the world's largest shag carpet.


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"Here I am, a dumb son-of-a-pregnant dog hick from rural Arkansas, helping manage one of the most phenomenal conservation stories of the last 200 years," says Sparling.

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"Damn close to pointless," said Gene Sparling, gently adrift in a kayak south of Bayou de View late last May, when I first met him. It was the 50-year-old Sparling—an amused, stoic Arkansan with blunt, sun-cured features—who first sighted one of the supposedly long-gone ivorybills, a red-crested male with lustrous black wings trailing a signature fringe of white, while on a solo pleasure cruise through the Big Woods in February 2004. (The embattled beauty of the place, a well-known birding destination, regularly drew him from his home in Hot Springs.) By mid-March, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy, along with Sparling and other key players, had launched the top-secret Inventory Project. Sparling, a lifelong amateur naturalist who never attended college, was tapped to co-direct the subsequent quest for the bird, a 14-month, 100-person sub-rosa stakeout in the swamp.

"Here I am, a dumb, son-of-a-pregnant dog hick from rural Arkansas, helping manage one of the most phenomenal conservation stories of the last 200 years, working with the most outstanding ornithologists on Planet Earth," said Sparling, whose name, with 16 others, appeared on the April 28, 2005, ivorybill announcement, which appeared on the journal Science's Web site prior to publication in the June 3 issue—a distinction most ornithologists would trade a finger for. "It's pretty cool."

Within four weeks of identifying the unextinct bird, Sparling had shuttered his stable, where he'd been running a horseback-riding business, and turned his attention to ivorybill stalking full-time. But the first long spate of concerted searching didn't exactly yield jaw-dropping results. Twenty-three thousand hours in the swamp turned up a mere six solid sightings, a few recordings of birdcalls and trees being bludgeoned, and a video: four blurry seconds of piebald wings flapping through the gloom, the hardest evidence going of the bird's revival. "Evidence means a photograph or, in this case, a crappy video with extensive analysis," says the video's author, David Luneau, a birder and technology professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. To certify that the footage shows an ivory-billed and not a pileated woodpecker, its closest look-alike, a battery of experts at Cornell subjected the footage to pixel-by-pixel scrutiny, concluding that, based on the bird's inordinate size and the broad trailing band of white on its wings—a pileated bears a lean white swoosh in the center of its otherwise black wings—Luneau's camera had indeed captured the genuine article.

Two dozen autonomous audio recorders, strapped to trees throughout the woods, logged a little over two years' worth of tape. Back at the Cornell Lab, in Ithaca, New York, a group of luckless people used pattern-recognition software to audition the recordings eight hours a day, ears pricked for the ivorybill's nasal, warbling tin-trumpet call ("kent, kent, kent") and the distinctive report of the bird tearing a tree trunk a new one. The mind-numbing work ultimately paid off, though. In July 2005, when a trio of rival scientists threatened to mount a challenge to the findings, the audio captures convinced the skeptics. Two months later, the Arkansas Audubon Society's Bird Records Committee amended the ivorybill's official status from "extirpated" to "present."

But two years after the rediscovery, the searching has yet to turn up signs of a breeding population or video evidence that doesn't require a team of Ph.D.'s to decipher. In the continuing quest to locate a remnant population of a bird that once flourished in the ancient forests that spanned the southern lowlands from North Carolina down to Florida and across to Texas, Ivorybill Search Team Two took to the Big Woods this winter. But it's an errand less reminiscent of the freewheeling adventures of John James Audubon than the nihilism of Samuel Beckett.

"Waiting for the Ivorybill," says Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell's Living Bird magazine and author of 2005's woodpecker-quest narrative The Grail Bird. "It gets old pretty quick."

Despite the possibility of fame—at least among an unglamorous ghetto of bird enthusiasts—and the more slender chance of getting rich off your story, spotting an ivorybill has not always been something you would wish upon yourself. For decades, claiming to have seen one could get you lumped in with folks who swaddle their heads in tinfoil to ward off mind-control rays beamed from outer space. George Lowery, a professor of zoology at Louisiana State University, showed up at a 1971 ornithological conference with ivorybill snapshots supposedly taken in Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin. His colleagues dismissed them as photos of stuffed specimens nailed to trees. In 1999, David Kulivan, an LSU undergraduate, professed to have seen a pair of ivorybills near Louisiana's Pearl River on April Fools' Day, but later searches (one of which relied on an animal psychic) turned up nothing. Doubters assailed Kulivan's credibility, and, weary of the ordeal, he clammed up.

But when that very first bird banked in front of Gene Sparling's kayak on February 11, 2004, he knew exactly what he'd seen. "I was familiar with the legend of the ivorybill," says Sparling, who speaks with a richly seasoned raconteurial drawl. "As a young man, I fantasized at great length of traveling to the Big Thicket, in Texas, finding a lost colony of ivorybills, and photographing them." Even so, he says, his jubilation at seeing the bird was marbled with pure terror. A wayfaring, neo-beatnik entrepreneur whose résumé includes a failed Baja whale-watching concern and an abandoned shiitake mushroom operation, Sparling was wary of a public drubbing: "I thought, Oh, nuts. Here I am, a guy with no education, no formal training, saying he'd seen an ivorybill. I expected everybody to say, 'Sparling, you idiot, you moron, you're delusional.' "

So Sparling didn't shout the news so much as mumble it, posting an obliquely phrased description of the sighting on the Arkansas Canoe Club's online message board. His report eventually came to the attention of two veteran ivorybill searchers: Bobby Harrison, a humanities professor at Alabama's Oakwood College, and Tim Gallagher, of Cornell. Working together, they'd spent the two previous years investigating ivorybill encounters throughout the Southeast. Two weeks after Sparling's run-

in with the woodpecker, they were in Arkansas, and Sparling guided them out into the swamp. On February 27, the second day of the trip, a large black-and-white bird with a vivid band of white on its wings sortied past their canoe.

"We both yelled, 'Ivorybill!' " says Gallagher. "Scared the hell out of the bird. We jumped out and sank to our knees in mud, scrambling over logs and branches, on the verge of cardiac arrest. Bobby, who's kind of a big redneck, just sat down and started sobbing." The bird's appearance was too brief for either man to get it on film. They spent another three days in the swamp before heading home empty-handed. "I was in shock," says Gallagher. "I went back to Ithaca looking like a ghost. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said I looked so bad, he thought I was going to tell him I had an incurable disease."

Though Gallagher and Harrison had urged Sparling to keep the sighting under wraps until they'd gotten hard proof, Sparling felt he had to alert the Nature Conservancy's Arkansas chapter, which had been working to preserve the Big Woods since the mid-eighties. "With the greatest respect to Cornell, I couldn't see leaving the discovery exclusively in the hands of people from New York—and not telling the key people in Arkansas who'd helped preserve the habitat where the bird was found," he says.

Soon the Cornell Lab and TNC scrambled their combined forces. In short order, they raised $1 million to help fund the search and took out a $10 million no-interest loan from an anonymous donor and put it toward reclaiming nearby farmlands to expand the bird's potential habitat. Cornell dispatched members of its crack birding team, the Sapsuckers. The mission was deeply classified; no one breathed a word to the press. To avoid suspicion from the locals, who were sure to cast a curious eye at out-of-towners prowling the woods without duck boots and shotguns, the searchers—between cold, wet vigils in the dense sliver of swampland—would spend the next year crashing at an unluxurious ranch house that had come with some of the newly acquired land.

OF ALL THE ENVIRONMENTAL HORRORS wrought by our destruction of the great forests of the South, the near-annihilation of the ivorybill is one of the most egregious. The largest woodpecker in North America, it stands just shy of two feet tall, talon to crest, with a three-foot wingspan and a sturdy white dagger of beak. The male wears a backswept vermilion crest radiating all the iconic power of a shark fin, and bolts of white plumage zigzag up its neck, as if poised to skewer its baleful golden eyes. The ivorybill's nickname is "the Lord God Bird." It's difficult, according to those who'd know, to behold the creature without being seized by the urge to roar, "Lord God, what a bird!"

Over the years, the creature's splendor has gotten it into trouble. Even before Columbus, Native Americans killed ivorybills in quantity, using the bird's vibrant feathers to jazz up their personal plumage. According to Phillip Hoose, author of 2004's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, Indians also carried around little sachets of crushed ivorybill heads, hoping it might help them poke holes in their enemies. In the early 19th century, frontier tchotchke hawkers sold ivorybill heads as souvenirs. Before cameras, ornithologists didn't simply watch birds; they shot them. So a species's fondest admirers could be among its greatest threats. (In 1820, Audubon himself killed three and used them as models for one of his paintings, which shows the birds gang-harassing a black beetle.) Collectors paid top dollar for stuffed ivorybills; one Victorian naturalist cherished the birds so highly that he accumulated 61 specimens in his private inventory. Hungry backwoods philistines simply ate them.

According to one account, though, ivorybills didn't surrender without a fight. In 1809, Scottish ornithologist Alexander Wilson shot one in a North Carolina swamp but only grazed it, to his later regret. He brought the wounded bird back to his hotel room, where it chiseled a 15-inch hole in the wall. He then tied it to a mahogany table, which it quickly pecked to chips. When Wilson tried to restrain it, he was gored bloodily and repeatedly. The bird expired after three days on hunger strike.

The ivory-billed woodpecker's Latin title is Campephilus principalis, which translates approximately to "number-one caterpillar aficionado." The bird's fussy diet—beetles and grubs that dwell deep in the subdermis of ailing old-growth trees—depends on huge forests with enough old trees to support a healthy population of wood-boring insects. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, southern forests, their inhabitants be damned, suffered the most brutal massacre ever inflicted on an American wetland ecosystem, disappearing in the advance of metastasizing railroads, satisfying the nation's surging appetite for lumber and clear-cut farmland. Timber companies scalped mammoth tracts—some bought for as little as 12 cents an acre—and milled the ancient trees into wood for house frames, ammunition crates, automobile chassis, and coffins. Many of the bottomland forests in the upper South were razed entirely. Logging firms descended like locusts on the Big Woods, which once spanned 24 million contiguous acres across seven states. When the sawdust cleared, only 4.4 million scattered acres of habitat remained.

In the thirties, Cornell ornithologist James Tanner discovered 13 ivorybills in one of the last remaining islands of habitat, known as the Singer Tract, an 81,000-acre forest in northeastern Louisiana that the Singer company had been slowly turning into cabinets for its sewing machines. But in 1937, Singer sold the forest to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, which resisted conservationists' entreaties and destroyed the woods. In 1944, illustrator Don Eckelberry sketched a solitary female ivorybill roosting in an ash tree on the edge of the ruins. Outside of rumors and unconfirmed reports, the bird would not be positively identified by another person until Gene Sparling came along.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

WHEN THE SEARCHERS finally revealed to the world, in April 2005, that the ivorybill had risen from the ashes, it touched off a media frenzy the likes of which the birding world had never seen. Every news organ from CNN to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch trumpeted the sighting. It hit the front page and editorial section of The New York Times; 60 Minutes sent a crew to the swamp; and NPR aired so many stories on the woodpecker, it seemed to have been adopted as the network mascot.

What fueled the furor was the ecstatic sensation that, for once, nature had pardoned our trespasses against it and returned to us a marvel we had tried our damnedest to destroy. After years of depressing portents of annihilated species, of ice caps in retreat, of the Kyoto Protocol ignored, of levee-bound rivers hurling our coastal wetlands out to sea, our mental picture of the future had begun to look like an endless desert with a single lonely species—our own—treading the sands. The ivorybill allowed us to savor the rare hope that the damage dealt our planet is not so wholly irreparable as we've feared.

One evening last May, I sat with Ron Rohrbaugh, Cornell's director of ivorybill research, on the edge of the swamp, pondering the woodpecker's resurrection. "That this bird squeezed through this bottleneck of time and habitat devastation—to think it made it through all that time . . ." Here Rohrbaugh trailed off, and his eyes grew red and moist. "It's just . . . miraculous."

And the woodpecker's odds in Arkansas are getting better, not worse. Since February 2004, the Nature Conservancy, with help from partners, has acquired or optioned more than 18,500 acres of potential habitat, with designs on a total of 200,000 acres in the next decade, half of which are to be reforested.


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What has fueled the furor is the ecstatic sensation that, for once, nature has pardoned our trespasses against it and returned to us a marvel tried our damnedest to destroy.

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At the moment, no part of the forest is off-limits to the public, though access to 5,000 acres around Bayou de View is strictly managed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which issues a handful of area permits each day. Duck hunters are welcomed. It may seem a bewildering policy to allow people to discharge shotguns within range of the world's rarest bird, but the folks at Cornell and TNC are quick to point out that the ivorybill wouldn't have survived if duck hunters, starting back in the thirties, hadn't led the fight to preserve the habitat, financing the state and federal purchase of 300,000 Big Woods acres and, via a six-year legal showdown in the seventies, preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from draining the swamp.

If a nest should turn up, the ivorybill effort will probably close off a half-mile cordon around the tree and maintain a cautious watch. But so far, no nest has revealed itself. Nor can the searchers say with any certainty that they've laid eyes on more than one bird; all positive sightings where sex could be determined have been of a male. (And, of course, he may have been the last of his kind, an omega man doomed to disappear beneath the bayou's coffee-colored waters.) So, right now, anything but watching and waiting is out of the question.

"Until we know we've got a viable population, captive breeding would be way too risky," says Rohrbaugh. After all, the measuring and weighing of a wild California condor chick in 1980 stressed the animal enough to kill it, and no one is eager to go down in history as the person whose well-intentioned bungling accidentally murdered the last of the ivorybills.

It's also possible that the bird's gene pool has withered so drastically that the remaining individuals are too severely inbred for long-term survival. But people like Tim Gallagher cling to a faith that the ivorybill will endure. Take the whooping crane, he says, which by the forties had dwindled to 15 creatures, and the condor, which bottomed out at just 22 wild birds in 1983; both species are now reproducing well, if only after millions upon millions of dollars spent resuscitating them. Gallagher believes the ivorybill may also still lurk in swamps in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida: "It's hard to say how many are out there, but I'm certain we didn't run into the last one in the world."

The Thing with Feathers

By Wells Tower


THOUGH THE BIG WOODPECKER may be hard to come by out in the swamp, you can find thousands of them 15 minutes east of Bayou de View, in Brinkley, where the bird appears on billboards, commemorative platters, mobiles, key rings, and T-shirts advertised on roadside marquees along with cut-rate suitcases of beer.

It's oddly fortunate, for both the bird and its environs, that the ivorybill resurfaced in one of the poorest places in America. Locally, hopes run high that it could help reverse the fortunes of the long-downtrodden Delta towns via an influx of ecotourism dollars. And plummeting prices for soybeans, cotton, and rice have allowed the Nature Conservancy to snap up disused cropland at bargain-basement prices.

Emblems of a desperate hope for the bird's revival, and the money sure to follow, fairly overwhelm Brinkley (pop. 3,567) these days. The town's main drag now hosts the Ivory Billed Inn; the Ivory-Bill Nest, a gewgaw shop; a hair salon specializing in "woodpecker haircuts" (black and white finger paint slathered onto the forescalp and sides of the head, finished with a gelled red crest up top); and Gene's Barbecue, where the menu includes the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Burger, Salad, and Hot Fudge Brownie.

One day last spring, I stopped in on the mayor, Billy Clay, whose head was topped with an immaculate polygon of silver hair. "The saddest day in Brinkley is graduation, because we spend all that money putting them through school, then all the kids move on," he said, adding that, like the rest of the town's citizens, he was praying that the ivorybill might help deliver the place from destitution, though the riches weren't yet flooding in.

Fifteen miles south, Clarendon (pop. 1,859) was holding its annual Big Woods Birding Festival, a sort of miniature carnival nucleating around avian motifs. According to the advance press, the star of the show, the absent-in-flesh-only ivorybill, was to be improbably feted with, among other things, something called a "mini-lawnmower tractor pull," a fishing derby, and, apropos of crackpot obsessions and contested extinctions, a performance by an Elvis impersonator.

Clarendon sits on the White River, the Big Woods' main aquatic artery. Ambient conditions there approximated those at an open-air shvitz, and the atmosphere was suffused with the thick, diarrheal odor of decaying vegetable matter, courtesy of a sawmill on the outskirts of town. The aroma mingled now and again with sweet, grease-scented siroccos of funnel-cake smell drifting up from an undersized midway a few blocks down. TNC's Jay Harrod was walking along Main Street, inspecting the rear bumpers of parked cars. "I was looking for out-of-state tags," he said. "There don't seem to be any." Far-flung ivorybill seekers, aware that there was little hope in finding the refuge's most elusive inhabitant while the trees were green, had mostly stayed home.

Children wailed and brawled inside a huffing Moonwalk. Three bullish policemen stood fingering the butts of their revolvers, as though expecting a riot to erupt any minute. On the far side of the courthouse lawn, a couple from the Little Rock Zoo gave a presentation on birds of prey. The woman wore a tropical-print visor and narrated through a treble-heavy public-address system while her husband, a man with a head of frizzy red hair that looked like a disguise, milled through the crowd with a turkey vulture named Gomez perched on his forearm, which was gloved in a sort of talon-proof mukluk. The woman described how the vultures defecate on their legs to keep cool—and deter predators with impossibly noxious vomit. A man eating a barbecue sandwich turned ashen and stopped chewing. He looked up at the vulture, back at the sandwich, then resumed miserably.

I ran into Gene Sparling, who was on his way to give a presentation on the ivorybill at the American Legion Hall. I'd heard about a catfish fry happening later that night, and I asked if he was going. He said he'd be there but reminded me that we had a swamp-patrolling date scheduled for the crack of dawn, which I pointed out was going to cramp our style at the open bar.

"I know it," Sparling replied. "I was hoping I'd be able to get dead drunk and pass out somewhere." Then, seeming to remember his new status as a respectable member of the ornithological community, he quickly added, "Just kidding. Haven't done that in years. It'd probably kill me."

The couple from the zoo departed, and the imitation Elvis took the stage. A teenager stood looking on, nodding along with "G.I. Blues" and eating a dilute snow cone the color of boiled shrimp. Strapped to his feet were what appeared to be a pair of owls, his costume, he explained, for an upcoming performance of a tribal dance. I asked if he hoped to find the ivorybill.

"I heard they already found 'em," he said. "They got a bunch of 'em locked up."
"Who do?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.

I'VE NEVER BEEN AN AVID WATCHER of birds, but after my fruitless trip to Arkansas I began suffering from a spell of ivorybill mania myself. During idle moments driving or sitting at home in North Carolina, I caught myself scanning the sky and nearby trees. At the public library one afternoon, I saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker hammering a pine outside. I stood up and yelled, "Hey, a woodpecker!"

Midsummer, I got hold of Gene Sparling, and we planned a weeklong kayak trip in the autumn, when the leaves would be off the trees and the media swarm would have thinned—and when I might have a shot at getting a glimpse, maybe even a photograph, of the phantom bird. The morning of our trip, I breakfasted at Gene's Barbecue with Sparling. We were joined by Nancy DeLamar and Scott Simon, of the Nature Conservancy. Simon, the state director, talked about TNC's local land acquisitions, which he said had been going well. The organization had just closed on an additional 5,000 acres, and earlier in the week they'd penned a $10 million state, federal, and private commitment for new conservation easements. "But if we had more money, we'd do more," he said.

When the plates were cleared, Sparling and I headed to Bayou de View. Sparling had spent his summer on the public-relations circuit, wooing donors for TNC's habitat-expansion efforts and reciting the tale of his sighting for a relentless battery of media. "It's good to get away from all that confusion," he told me.

We drove past fields of cotton, which still had downy microcumuli clinging to their brittle branches, remnants of the autumn harvest. Where the farmland ended, the Big Woods rose in a gray-green mantle. Crossing the bridge over the bayou, Sparling slowed his truck, panning his gaze through the sky above the road. "As many times as I've been over this bridge," he said, "I do always keep my eyes peeled when I drive through." (In fact, a Fish and Wildlife employee had supposedly seen the bird there a few days earlier, though he hadn't spotted enough of the field marks—bill, plumage, etc.—for the sighting to constitute big news.)

Sparling parked on a gravel landing and we began hoisting the kayaks off the rack of his truck. A pair of search-team members emerged from the forest, carrying a canoe. One wore a Sherpa hat and a five-o'clock shadow. The other was dressed as a shrub, in a camo jacket bristling with little leaflike tatters.

"Seeing anything, gentlemen?" Sparling asked.

"Nope," said the man in the Sherpa hat. They'd been out there erecting tree blinds in which the searchers were assigned to perch for eight cold hours a day.

A Ford F-150 with Montana plates rattled down to the landing. A small fleet of kayaks was belted to the roof. A middle-aged man got out and ambled over to us. He had big aviator shades and an air of highway loneliness about him.

"What are you guys looking for?" he asked, noting my camera, which was outfitted with a zoom lens the size of a soup thermos.

"Take a wild guess," Sparling said. He and Sparling exchanged introductions, and the man raised his eyes and rocked back on his heels.

"The number-one spotter," the man said. "I thought it might be you."

Sparling shifted somewhat uncomfortably, and he asked the guy what he did for a living back in Montana.

"Which career? Which life?" the man said. "Now mostly I'm just a vagabond bum, looking to do kayaking and birdwatching full-time."

Sparling said, "A man after my own heart; it's a wonderful life."

We slid our boats into the bayou. Paddling away, Sparling cast a sympathetic glance back at the nomadic birder. "I feel bad for these guys who drive all the way across the country to try to see this bird," he said. "I'd like to tell 'em I spent a year out here and didn't see a damn thing. Could've saved him the trip."

Sparling glided out into the silty water, threading his way through the cypress maze. A few minutes in, I saw a bird, a flash of white vivid against the tree trunks. "Gene!" I said.

"Kingfisher," he said, without bothering to look. "To be honest," he added, "I have somewhat let go of the need to see the bird again myself. Seeing it's not nearly as important as restoring the habitat. If we give him a place to live, he can take care of himself. It doesn't matter whether we know where he is or not."

The fall had been dry in Arkansas, and the water in the swamp was low. The vandals of the forest, beavers, had dammed the channel every few hundred yards, and we had to vault strenuously over their blockades, breathing in the spicy stink of their musk.

The bayou broadened into an oblong black lake, and Sparling suddenly got quiet, watching a black confetti of crows tumbling above the tree line about 150 yards away. "Hold on," he said. "The bird was seen right here, getting mobbed by crows, and these guys are sure as hell chasing something." But the crows veered out of sight. Their cawing faded and the only sound in the swamp was the conch-shell moan of Interstate 40, which the woodpecker(s) had almost certainly crossed to be seen up this way. Sparling shook his head at the thought of it. "It's amazing: Here you've got what's probably the rarest bird in the world, regularly flying over I-40." He shrugged and paddled on. "Sure hope he's flying high."

Farther down, we pulled out into a shallow canyon of trees where the forest had been cleared to accommodate a long, stolid parade of telephone poles. The sun was throwing a platinum glow on the dark water, and the trees blurred and shimmered with reflected, dying light. Dusk was coming on, and whatever birds were out there would soon be heading home to roost. I shipped my paddle, my boat turning idly in the autumn wind like the needle on a compass. And then something caught my eye, a far-off flare of red, white, and black. I raised my camera, nearly dropping it in my haste, and focused on the flitting colors, which turned out to be a load of glossy new sedans on an 18-wheeler barreling east along the interstate.

[another specialist]

melanie said:

University of Arkansas Studies Woodpecker's Habitat
The Associated Press
Thursday, April 20, 2006; 10:20 PM


FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Much like the bird that drew attention to it, Bayou de View _ where birders reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker _ is critically endangered, researchers said Thursday.

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville graduate students spent last fall slogging through hip-deep mud to study the cypresses and other trees in the eastern Arkansas bayous. They found a forest of bald cypress and tupelo, an ecosystem that has all but disappeared from the landscape.

Researchers estimate that less than 5,000 hectares of such a forest remain in the south, a fraction of the original 17 million hectares.

"We're talking about an extremely endangered forest habitat," said graduate student Mark Spond.

The students measured tree rings on several of the trees and found a handful that were more than 1,000 years old. They used the tree rings to map historic precipitation patterns in the forest.

The research reconstructs the weather in the forest for the past 850 years. Students found evidence of severe droughts in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries in the trees.

Although bald cypress trees thrive in dry conditions, the researchers speculate that the droughts may have killed off other trees _ and may have caused an increase in the number of ivory-billed woodpeckers.

The woodpeckers feed on wood-boring larvae that live in dying and recently dead trees.

The students, along with professor David Stahle, reported their findings in Eos, the newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.