Ghost Birds of the Choctawhatchee

Evidence of ivory-bills reported in Florida

By Pat Leonard

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is playing hide-and-seek again. Biologist Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University in Alabama says his team has collected sound recordings and sight records that show ivory-bills may inhabit the Florida panhandle in the Choctawhatchee River basin. The findings were published in the September 26 issue of Avian Conservation and Ecology.

The Florida search team found tree cavities large enough to have been excavated by Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

Courtesy of Geoffrey Hill

"We're not claiming proof of ivory-bills," cautions Hill. "We're building this all on supposition from a data set and putting all our data out there." The data include sound recordings, photos of tree cavities that were possibly excavated by ivory-bills, measurements of bark that may have been peeled by foraging ivory-bills, and field sketches.

The search yielded no photos, an outcome as frustrating for the Florida team as it has been for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's search team in Arkansas. "We don't have any good pictures," Hill says. "It drove us crazy. Without finding an active roost or nest hole, getting a picture of these birds is really tough."

The Lab's director, John Fitzpatrick, says the report from Florida is extremely exciting. "Just as we'd hoped, researchers throughout the original range of the species are now investigating local reports and unexplored forests," he says.

"I think it illustrates the urgent need for a long-overdue, coordinated, comprehensive, rangewide search from Texas and Arkansas up across to the Carolinas. This is the time to pull out all the stops."

The Florida search was prompted by the April 2005 announcement from the Lab and partners that at least one ivory-bill had been documented in Arkansas. Hill recalled having received a report of an ivory-bill in Geneva County, Alabama, about 10 years earlier. In late May 2005, he took a weekend trip to the Pea River area with field technicians Brian Rolek and Tyler Hicks. Disappointed at finding unsuitable habitat, they decided on the spur of the moment to head farther south into Florida.

Without even a detailed map of the area, they picked a boat launch along the Choctawhatchee River purely at random. Within an hour, Hill says, "We heard something banging in a really solid manner on a tree, up above us in the canopy. We couldn't see it—all we could hear was this loud banging, loud hammering."

As they moved around to see what was making the noise, a bird took off. Only Rolek saw it, and described white trailing edges on the upper side and underside of black wings, classic ivory-bill plumage. Later that morning, Hill says he heard a double knock.

The following weekend Hill and Hicks returned to the site. "Tyler got a clear look at a female ivory-bill through his binoculars, flying through the forest," Hill says. "And when Tyler got a clear look—Tyler's the best field ornithologist I've ever been out with—I would trust his sightings better than anybody in North America."

Hill then enlisted the help of Dan Mennill at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, an expert in sound recording and analysis. The team worked the Florida site from December 2005 through April 2006. In the two-square-mile study area, they set up seven "listening stations" using recording devices created by Mennill, a former postdoctoral researcher with the Lab of Ornithology's Bioacoustics Research Program.

In all, the team reported 13 sightings by 4 individuals, including two occasions when observers saw a pair of birds. Hill says the sound analysis turned up 210 kent-like calls the team considers "really convincing." Some of the sounds do not match the kent calls of a pair of ivory-bills recorded by Lab founder Arthur Allen and collaborators during a 1935 expedition to Louisiana, but they also don't match the sounds of any other known animal in the Florida panhandle. The double knocks are intriguing but, as the Lab's acoustic experts found with the recordings from Arkansas, it's nearly impossible to say conclusively whether they were made by an ivory-bill or another source.

"I'm most excited about the fact that they have woodpecker cavity holes, several of which appear to be reasonably fresh and are bigger than the excavations typically made by Pileated Woodpeckers," says Fitzpatrick. "There's nothing else that would be digging those except a larger woodpecker. The cavities are the right shape and size and they're placed in the right spots."

Hill says the federal government and the state of Florida have committed funds to expand the search to a six-square-mile area. Fitzpatrick says the Lab of Ornithology is poised to work as a cooperative partner in the range-wide search for the ivory-bill. "We're hoping we can help play a role in the success of the Florida team, as well as that of any of the other local searches that may request our help."

As for finding more ivory-bills in Florida and in other states where searches will be taking place, Mennill says, "Wouldn't that be wonderful? You know we got a spark of hope from Arkansas—we've got another spark now from Florida and so maybe this will start a fire all across the American South."

For more information, visit Geoff Hill's web site "Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the Florida Panhandle" and Dan Mennill's web site, with access to sound recordings.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu