The Bird News Heard Round the World

When researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, few could have predicted the international impact

by Rachel Dickinson

April 28, 2005; Washington, D. C. -- In an auditorium at the Department of the Interior, packed with reporters and representatives from all the major media, Lab of Ornithology director John Fitzpatrick stood up to make an announcement. Behind him sat Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johann, as well as two senators and several other prominent dignitaries. "I can't begin to tell you how thrilling it is to say that after 60 years of fading hope, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker lives in the Big Woods of Arkansas," said Fitzpatrick. This stunning pronouncement--that this magnificent bird, for so long believed to be extinct, had been found in rural eastern Arkansas-- caught the imaginations of even the most jaded members of the Washington press corps and launched a shock wave of media attention felt around the globe.

"Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives," said Fitzpatrick.

Scott Simon, director of the Arkansas chapter of The Nature Conservancy, also spoke at the press conference. "It is a landmark rediscovery," he said. "Finding the ivory-bill in Arkansas validates decades of great conservation work and represents an incredible story of hope for the future." Simon had been an early partner in the effort to learn more about the Arkansas ivory-bills and preserve vital habitat to ensure their well-being.

Secretary Norton praised the efforts of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy, and the other partners and pledged $10 million in federal funds to aid the effort to preserve and restore vital bottomland swamp forest habitat in the Big Woods and to fund more Ivory-billed Woodpecker research.

The Lab had launched a major search effort fourteen months earlier after a lone bird was sighted in a bayou at the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge (above).

Photo by Mark Godfrey/The Nature Conservancy

By the following morning, the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was front-page news in Britain, Germany, India, Turkey, Australia, and a host of other countries, not to mention the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and most other major newspapers in this country. But some questions remained: How had the researchers managed to keep this story quiet for 14 months? Why had they kept the rediscovery a secret? And how had we gone from a birder sitting on a fallen log sobbing in February 2004 to a major peer-reviewed article in the journal Science and a national press conference to announce the ivory-bill's rediscovery in late April 2005?

The why is easy. At the beginning there was no physical evidence of the bird's existence-- only the eyewitness testimony of three people. It would have been premature to announce the rediscovery of a supposedly long-extinct bird without being able to produce tangible evidence that could be measured, analyzed, and assessed. The research team decided early to send teams of searchers into the swamp to look for the bird or birds and to assess the quality of the habitat. At the same time, the Arkansas chapter of The Nature Conservancy stepped up its efforts to bring more land in the area into conservation.

In addition, government agencies needed time to develop contingency plans to deal with issues such as conservation of the area and public visitation plans. The last thing anyone wanted was to have a huge influx of visitors, all eager to see an ivory-bill, without any plans in place for directing them or perhaps limiting access to certain key areas. The core team, which later came to be called the Big Woods Conservation Partnership (including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy, Oakwood College, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and other organizations and federal and state agencies) hoped to search at least through late April 2005 before making an announcement.

How they kept the secret is more of a mystery. How can you expect a birder to keep something like this under wraps for more than a year? Most birders like nothing more than to tell all their friends about their latest great bird sighting--and here they had seen the bird of the century and couldn't admit it to anyone outside the search team. The answer is that everyone involved with the search effort understood the need to keep the story quiet for the good of the bird, and they were largely successful.

Martjan Lammertink of the Netherlands is the world expert on large woodpeckers and has searched for ivory-bills in Cuba and Louisiana. He joined the team as lead biologist in November 2004 and spent the entire field season in the swamps of Arkansas. Photo by Mark Godfrey/The Nature Conservancy

How things progressed from Gene Sparling's original sighting to Bobby Harrison crying after seeing an ivory-bill (see "A Bayou with a View,") to the announcement 14 months later is a long, involved, but very interesting story. It began when John Fitzpatrick looked out his office door one morning in early March 2004 and saw Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher standing there, wild-eyed, exhausted, and disheveled--like a character from a 19th-century adventure novel who washes ashore with a wild tale of shipwrecks, pirates, and buried treasure. In this case, the treasure was the glimpse he'd had of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

After grilling him thoroughly about the sighting he'd had a few days earlier with Harrison, Fitzpatrick concluded there was a strong possibility that Gallagher had indeed seen an ivor y-bill. Within days, he sent Gallagher back to the swamp with Cornell graduate student Andy Farnsworth--a top birder and international birding tour leader. Less than two weeks later, the Lab's entire big-day birding team, the Sapsuckers--John Fitzpatrick, Ken Rosenberg, Jeff Wells, Kevin McGowan (and his son, Jay), and Steve Kelling--joined the fray and began a biological inventory of the swamp. This proved to be incredibly grueling work in the swamp, where the water in many places is too low to float a canoe and the mud is too gooey to support your weight if you attempt to walk.

Three eyewitnesses: David Luneau (left), Gene Sparling, and Jim Fitzpatrick (brother of Lab director John Fitzpatrick). The videotape shot by Luneau on April 25, 2004, provided the best physical evidence to date of the existence of an ivory-bill in Arkansas and formed the basis of the article in the journal Science. Photo by Mark Godfrey/The Nature Conservancy

The entire month of March 2004 passed without another sighting, despite the constant presence of searchers in the swamp. But then in early April, as biologists spread out into other areas along the bayou, they were rewarded with a flurry of sightings. At midmorning on April 5, Jim Fitzpatrick (John's brother) spotted an ivory-bill flying above the trees along the opposite shore of a narrow lake. The following day, Ron Rohrbaugh (then Citizen Science director at the Lab) and David Brown (videographer at the Lab's Macaulay Library) spotted a large woodpecker with a white lower back in the same area as Jim Fitzpatrick's sighting. Then on April 10, Mindy LaBranche (of Urban Bird Studies) saw an ivory-bill flying above the trees on the southern edge of the same lake. The next day, Melanie Driscoll (of Bird Population Studies) saw a bird she said was unmistakably an ivory-bill.

These were exciting developments, but unfortunately no one managed to get a picture or a videotape of the bird, so there was still no tangible evidence. This would all change on April 25, 2004. On that day, David Luneau, a professor of computer science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and his brother-in-law Robert Henderson were canoeing through the bayou, checking on some motion-triggered still cameras that Luneau had set up in various places along the bayou. Luneau had gotten into the habit of always leaving a camcorder running in the canoe as he paddled from place to place. The idea was that if he saw an interesting bird flying past, he could grab the camcorder instantly, point it at the bird, and perhaps capture an identifiable image. As it turned out, when a likely looking bird did flush from the trunk of a tupelo, he didn't have time to pick up his camcorder but, miraculously, it was pointing in the right direction to record the bird.

Long-time ivory-bill searcher David Luneau sits quietly in his canoe, dressed in camouflage, hoping to catch sight of the elusive woodpecker. Photo by Mark Godfrey/The Nature Conservancy

The videotape Luneau shot was far less than optimal--it was in soft focus and somewhat blurred from motion--but most of the key ivory-bill field marks were there: the jet-black body, tail, and wingtips; the brilliant white going all the way to the trailing edge of its secondary and inner primary flight feathers.

Of course, everyone thought this was just the beginning. Soon someone would get the perfect Ivory-billed Woodpecker picture or videotape, and Luneau's video would become a mere footnote. This was not to be. By March 2005, all of the researchers realized that Luneau's video would be the primary physical evidence for the ivory-bill's existence in the Big Woods. Despite thousands of hours spent in the Cache River and White River National Wildlife Refuges by more than 30 searchers, only a handful of additional sightings had taken place. The only other photographic evidence was a video of a possible ivory-bill taken by Bobby Harrison on September 4, 2004, but the view it provided was even briefer than Luneau's and the bird was flying through dense green leaves.

The researchers decided to present Luneau's video as the centerpiece of their evidence that the ivory-bill still exists. But how could they prove one way or another that the bird in the blurry video was the long-sought icon of the southern swamp forest? They began by asking what else this bird could be. They reasoned that it could not be a duck or other waterfowl, because it had been clinging woodpecker-like to the back of a tupelo peeking around at them when they flushed it. The bird was large and was clearly black and white, which would rule out everything but an Ivory-billed or a Pileated woodpecker.

So, why not a pileated? That was the crux of the problem the researchers had to work out. They began by returning to the exact spot where the bird took off and measuring the tree trunk and the distance between the place where the wrist of the bird's wing and its tail had been visible, providing a crucial size measurement. In addition, they performed reenactments of the bird taking off from the trunk, using life-sized, correctly colored models of a Pileated and an Ivory-billed woodpecker, to see if there was any way--by using a slow shutter speed and an out-of-focus lens--to create an image with the pileated model that looked as white in the wings as the bird in the video. In every case, the Pileated Woodpecker model had significantly less white visible and the black trailing edge of its wings showed clearly, whereas in the videos taken of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker model, the image looked virtually identical in color pattern to the bird in Luneau's video.

The researchers also took numerous measurements of Ivory-billed and Pileated woodpecker specimens as well as measurements from photographs of ivory-bills that Arthur Allen took in Louisiana's Singer Tract in 1935. Fortunately, the actual trunk of the tree with the cavity that these birds nested in had been brought back to Cornell by Allen, so they were able to measure from the actual tree and determine the exact size of the living ivory-bills in the Allen photographs. The bird in Luneau's video is significantly larger than a Pileated Woodpecker--in fact, it is in the upper range for an ivorybill, which effectively eliminates the possibility that the bird is anything but an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

The analysis of David Luneau's video and seven of the best-documented sightings form the basis for the article written by John Fitzpatrick and the other primary researchers in the Big Woods Partnership that was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal, Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

What does the future hold for the bird, the habitat, and the researchers studying there? For the latter, a lot more work. So far, the search team has focused its efforts in approximately 16 of the 850 square miles in the bottomland forests of Arkansas. Fitzpatrick said the next step will be to broaden the search to assess whether breeding pairs exist and how many ivory-bills the region may support. To expand the area being monitored and minimize disturbance to the endangered woodpecker, the team will continue to use acoustic monitoring (see sidebar on page 13) as well as on-the-ground searching. Fitzpatrick said the team will also encourage others to search for the ivory-bill elsewhere in suitable habitats throughout the South.

Simon of The Nature Conservancy said that over the years, state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, hunters, and landowners have aggressively worked to conserve and restore the bottomland hardwood and swamp ecosystem. "Now we know we must work even harder to conserve this critical habitat--not just for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, but for the black bears, waterfowl, and many other species in these unique woods," he added.

The partnership's 10-year goal is to restore 200,000 more acres of forest in the Big Woods. The effort will include conserving forest habitat, improving river water quality, and restoring the physical structure of the river channels, focusing on locations with maximum benefit in reconnecting forest patches and protecting river health.

"The ivory-bill tells us that we could actually bring this system back to a near-primeval state here in the heartland of North America," said Fitzpatrick. "That's the kind of forest that I hope some generation of Americans and citizens of the world will get to come and visit."

Rachel Dickinson is a freelance writer based in Freeville, New York.

 

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Jennifer Smith, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-2497. email: jls39@cornell.edu