The ivory-billed woodpecker–thought to be extinct for 60 years–has been found to survive in Arkansas’ remote Big Woods hardwood forest, lifting the hearts of scientists and legions of birdwatchers who never gave up looking for a species so spectacular it is known as the Lord God bird.
Rediscovery of the species was seen as important enough that two members of President Bush’s Cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, attended the announcement Thursday in Washington, D.C.
“Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives,” said ornithologist John Fitzpatrick, lead author of an article on the surprising find published online by the journal Science. Once the Field Museum’s bird curator, he is now at Cornell University.
A regal, crested resident of wetland forests of cypress and tupelo trees, the woodpecker is 20 inches long and has a brilliant white bill. Its powerful wings have wide swaths of snowy white feathers that contrast with the dark plumage of the rest of its body.
In the time of President Theodore Roosevelt–the early 20th Century–the woodpecker was already so close to extinction that, when one did appear, people were said to exclaim, “Lord God, what is that bird!”, thus giving it its nickname.
Their last known nesting area was a Louisiana forest owned by the Singer Sewing Machine Co., which cut the hardwood to make cases for its machines. In the 1930s, naturalists tried to get the forest set aside to protect the few known nesting pairs. Instead, Singer sold the forest to a Chicago lumber firm that, during World War II, clear-cut what trees were left to make coffins and ammunition boxes.
Unseen since 1944
The last verified sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker was a female sketched by an Audubon Society artist in a remnant of the Singer tract in 1944. Since then, the bird has been eulogized and mourned in countless elegiac articles and books.
On Feb. 11, 2004, however, Arkansas woodsman Gene Sparling was kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge when he saw an unusually large woodpecker with unfamiliar markings land in a tree.
He posted a description on a birdwatchers’ Web site. Six days later, Tim Gallagher, a writer who for years had been researching the woodpecker’s demise for a book, saw the posting and telephoned Sparling.
“I grilled him for three hours,” said Gallagher, who edits a quarterly magazine, Living Bird, for Cornell University’s ornithology lab.
“For years I have tried to track down anybody who ever thought they might have seen an ivory-bill. Within 30 seconds, I can usually tell they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve only ever talked to a few who I thought might have seen something interesting, and Gene was one.”
A couple of days later, Gallagher and his friend Bobby Harrison, an art professor and photographer, flew to Arkansas.
“You have to understand,” said Gallagher, “the ivory-billed woodpecker is the holy grail among birdwatchers.” In fact, his upcoming book is titled, “The Grail Bird: The Search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.”
Though the species has been listed as extinct, there have been just enough sighting reports that dedicated birdwatchers still dream of seeing one.
The men set out to float down the slow-moving Cache River in search of the bird. On the second morning, with Sparling far ahead in his kayak, Gallagher said a big bird “with perfect ivory-billed wing patterns” flew directly in front of the canoe carrying the other men and veered into trees along the bank.
“Ivory bill!” he said both men shouted in unison. They turned their boat to the riverbank, tumbled out into knee-deep mud and scrambled over fallen logs. But the bird was gone.
“After 20 minutes or so, I said to Bobby we should sit right down while everything was fresh in our minds to write up our field notes separately, and each do a drawing of the bird we saw,” Gallagher said. “By the time we were finished, we were emotional wrecks. Bobby was just sitting there, sobbing, saying, `I saw an ivory-bill. I saw an ivory-bill.’ I was so choked up, I couldn’t say a word.”
Sighting kept a secret
Knowing that the spotting would set off an explosion of interest among the nation’s 70 million birdwatchers, the three men decided to buy time by keeping the find a secret.
Working with Cornell’s ornithology department and the Nature Conservancy, a leading private environmental group, the men` organized scientists to attempt more sightings and began work with federal and state agencies on a protection plan for the bird’s habitat.
In the last year, teams of qualified scientists spent 7,000 hours combing hundreds of square miles in Arkansas’ Big Woods, a 550,000-acre area of bayous, bottomlands and oxbow lakes.
Only a few more confirmed observations emerged, including one sighting recorded on video. That tape has been analyzed frame-by-frame, as have audio recordings “believed to be of the bird’s distinctive double-rap drumming display,” said a Cornell news release.
In the Science report, researchers conceded to being puzzled by the relatively few sightings and the scarcity of acoustic evidence of the bird’s presence, saying it “may be a consequence of extremely low population density.”
But they also said they were heartened by the growing amount of protected area in the region. “If a few breeding pairs do exist, most of the conditions believed to be required for successful breeding and population growth are becoming more available to them.”
In the last 20 years the Nature Conservancy has been buying tracts of private land in the Big Woods region, including the area where Sparling first spotted the woodpecker. To date, the conservancy has purchased 120,000 acres in the region, now part of the Cache River refuge.
“Much of the money for [recent] purchases came from private philanthropy,” said Scott Simon, the conservancy’s director in Arkansas and a native of suburban Highland Park. “The Chicago connection here is that we couldn’t have done this at all without the help of Jamee and Marshall Field V. Their support has been critical.”
Forestland decimated
Before European settlements began to spread across the U.S., much of the South was covered with 24 million acres of swampy forestland populated by bears, wolves, panthers and songbirds. Those forests were relentlessly removed for hardwood and farmland, until only 4.4 million scattered acres remained.
The idea that the bird’s rediscovery is an omen of hope for threatened wilderness suffused the official statements of bureaucrats and conservationists alike Thursday. The Bush administration made a big show of support to protect the bird with more than $10 million in federal funds committed to research and habitat protection efforts.
Among the scientists called in to try for confirmation sightings of the bird were Field Museum ornithologists Doug Stotz and Dave Willard, who spent one and two weeks, respectively, in the area earlier this month. Neither of the men spotted the bird, but the earlier evidence of its existence was convincing, said Stotz.
“A bird that is that big and flashy,” marveled Stotz, “and to think for so many years that it was extinct, then find it an hour away from a city as big as Little Rock, is pretty extraordinary. You think you know everything there is to be known about North America, but this shows we don’t; there’s a lot out there we still don’t know about it.”
