Published: October 12, 2006 11:42 am            

Is the ivory-billed woodpecker making a comeback from extinction?

Outdoors locally

With the last confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the 1940s this huge woodpecker has long been considered extinct. But the Ivory-billed may be a Lazarus species — a species that is rediscovered alive after being considered extinct for some time.

A group of ornithologists from Auburn University in Alabama and the University of Windsor in Ontario spent four months in the cypress swamps of the Choctawhatchee River basin in northwest Florida this year and these researchers say they have seen and heard the rare bird once believed to be extinct.

“On 14 occasions different team members have seen the bird. We heard that double knock, it’s a sound the ivory-bill makes that no other bird makes, but we didn’t get a clear video of the bird,” said Geoffrey Hill, Auburn ornithologist and team leader.

Hill also said team members heard the bird’s unique call 41 times. Some of the sounds were recorded. Other evidence includes tell-tale foraging signs and appropriately sized tree nest cavities.

But the lack of photographic evidence is causing experts to be skeptical.

“I think people should be skeptical. I think they should demand clear photographic evidence. I might start to get skeptical myself thinking, ‘I’ve seen this bird,’ but how could I have seen a bird that it is impossible to photograph,” Hill said.

Hill said his team would return to the Choctawhatchee River basin around November with better equipment to try to get photographs.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation commission is working with the federal government and some private agencies to provide additional funding for Hill’s team.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is one of the largest woodpecker species in the world, measuring between 19 and 21 inches. The bird is shiny blue-black with extensive white markings on its neck and on both the upper and lower trailing edges of its wings. The pure white chisel-like bill is very large. Both the male and female sport a prominent top crest, red in the male and black in the female.

Ivory-billeds are known to prefer thick hardwood swamps and pine forest, with large amounts of dead and decaying trees. At one time, they ranged from East Texas to North Carolina and from Southern Illinois to Florida and Cuba. But extensive logging by timber companies in the southern U.S. decimated the extensive and continuous areas of forest needed for Ivory-billeds to survive. These birds need about 10 square miles per pair so they can find enough food to feed their young and themselves. Hence, they occur at low densities even with healthy populations.

By 1938, an estimated 20 individuals remained in the wild, located in the old-growth forest called the Singer Tract in Louisiana, where logging rights were held by the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company. The company brushed aside pleas from four Southern governors and the National Audubon Society that the tract be publicly purchased and set aside as a reserve, and clearcut the forest. By 1944 the last known Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a female, was gone from the cut-over tract.

Then a group of 17 authors headed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reported the discovery of at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a male, in the Big Woods area of Arkansas in 2004 and 2005, publishing the report in the journal Science on April 28, 2005.

One of the authors, who was kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, Monroe County, Arkansas, on Feb. 11, 2004, reported on a website the sighting of an unusually large red-crested woodpecker. This report led to more intensive searches there and in the White River National Wildlife Refuge, undertaken in deepest secrecy for fear of a stampede of bird-watchers, by experienced observers over the next fourteen months.

About 15 sightings occurred during the period (seven of which were considered compelling enough to mention in the scientific article), possibly all of the same bird. The secrecy permitted the Nature Conservancy and Cornell University to quietly buy up Ivory-billed habitat to add to the 120,000 acres (490 km) of the Big Woods protected by the Conservancy.

A very large woodpecker was videotaped on April 25, 2004; its size, wing pattern at rest and in flight, and white plumage on its back between the wings were cited as evidence that the woodpecker sighted was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. That same video included an earlier image of what was suggested to be such a bird perching on a Water Tupelo.

But again, other experts were not convinced that the bird was an Ivory-billed. Many remain steadfast in their belief that the bird in the video is a normal Pileated Woodpecker.

Most of us who have spent much time in forest areas have seen a Pileated Woodpecker. They are numerous and not federally endangered. The Pileated is about the size of a small crow — about 16 inches long. Thus he is smaller than the Ivory-billed. Also, his back is almost all black when the bird is perched. Much white is visible on the back of an Ivory-billed. And, instead of a huge bill, ivory in color, the Pileated has a smaller bill, grey to black in color.

Hopefully, the Auburn-Windsor team will get a vivid, indisputable photo this winter in those Florida swamps. If so, Lazarus has risen.



Jim Darnell is an ordained minister and host/producer of the syndicated outdoors show God’s Great Outdoors. His column appears every Thursday in The Daily Record.

        

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