Ivory-bill Decoys
"Well I got tired of chasing the bird around the swamp and decided
to try to bring the bird to me," said Bobby Harrison, long-time
ivory-bill chaser and professor of art history at tiny Oakwood College
in Huntsville, Alabama. Harrison and Tim Gallagher saw an ivory-bill
fly in front of their canoe on February 27, 2004.
Bobby Harrison carved
several life-sized decoys from tupelo wood and painted them to
represent male or female birds. As Harrison says, "All it takes is a
spot of paint to change the gender." He then selected an area he
thought might be a good flyway for an ivory-bill and mounted a decoy on
the side of a tupelo or cypress tree about 15 feet up from the surface
of the water. Then two remote cameras were mounted a distance from the
tree and trained on the decoy from different angles. It was painstaking
work to get everything set up.
Then Harrison waited. Sitting
in canoe completely obscured by camouflage, he stayed at least 200 feet
from the decoy. At the end of four hours he retrieved his cameras and
the decoy, and labeled his tapes so he could watch them in his motel
room that night.
