Taking a leisurely paddle through the bottom-land swamps of eastern Arkansas’s “Big Woods” region in February of 2004, Gene Sparling was just enjoying some quiet time alone. A large bird flew over his head and landed on a tree beside him catching his attention. Sparling thought it was an unusual bird and observed it closely, but he could not identify it as one of the typical birds he had become accustomed to seeing on his frequent trips through the bayou.

When he returned home, he placed a description of the large bird on a local kayaker’s list-serve to get help from others identifying the markings. He had no pictures, and nothing to compare the bird to, just a brief description from his observations. However, by placing the bird’s description on the list-serve, Sparling set off a sequence of events that by the next year became the first feel-good story of the 21st Century for wildlife conservation.

As important stories usually do, the bird’s description quickly moved from private list-serve to the experts at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. Researchers at the lab began identification proceedings to confirm what many believed was the sighting of a bird that has been considered extinct for over sixty years – the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Sparling was “not an ace birder, not someone out working on his life list chasing Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,” explained Dr. Ken Rosenberg from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Ivory-billed Woodpecker recovery team. He was “just a kayaker working the bayous in eastern Arkansas.”

The Cornell experts found the story, and the bird’s description compelling and began fourteen months of extensive searching to establish some kind of record confirming the birds rediscovery. It was this long and arduous process of compiling enough good data to support an argument for rediscovery that Dr. Rosenberg described extensively as he presented the labs findings at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources weekly Thursday seminar on October 6th. These same findings were used by the Cornell team to publish its rediscovery announcement article in the June 2005 edition of Science magazine.

“The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was a symbol of the great virgin forests of the southern United States, both the bottom-land and the long-leaf pines,” Dr. Rosenberg explained to the more than 200 seminar attendees. The largest woodpecker in North America and the third largest in the world, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker inhabits mature swampy forests, roaming large areas in search of dead and dying trees infested with beetle larvae, its primary food. At 18 to 20 inches tall, it has a wingspan of 30 to 31 inches and weighs 16 to 20 ounces. The bird has a jet black body with large white patches on the wings. A white stripe extends from below each yellow-colored eye, down the sides of the neck and onto the sides of its back. When the wings are folded, it appears that there is a large "shield" of white on the lower back of an ivory-bill.

The bird was considered rare by the late 1800’s as its disappearance corresponded directly with the removal of its habitat throughout the southeastern United States. To the great fortune of the present-day researchers at the Cornell lab, however, in the 1930’s the lab’s founder, Arthur Allen, and a graduate student, James Tanner, both conducted research that compiled abundant physical data and sound recording evidence of the bird. This historical data is now used as a base-line comparison for present-day identification.

Dr. Rosenberg explained that after a few months with no luck finding the bird, a flurry of sightings began in April 2004. By this time over a hundred team members in a variety of areas of expertise were taking turns combing the “Big Woods” for solid evidence of the Ivory-billed Woodpeckers existence. Using advanced search methods, from sound and video recordings to roost hole searches and GPS documentation, the team searched over forty-one square kilometers of area.

“We were not getting the killer video and killer pictures we were looking for,” said Dr. Rosenberg. Then on April 25, 2004, team member David Luneau achieved a “flash sighting” of the bird using a continuous loop video recorder mounted to his canoe. And while the video image is poor at best, the team began extensive examination and comparison to historical evidence and the closest possible imitator found in the same woods – the Pileated Woodpecker. A real-time reenactment using life size models was conducted, calculated measurements of color patterns were examined, and wing-beat counts were quantified as the bird quickly flies off into the woods.

Excitement grew as team members became more convinced that rediscovery was actually occurring, but skeptics kept the professionals working to solidify the evidence. So, the team turned to audio recordings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s "Kent-calls" and the unmistakable double-knock of its bill on a tree-trunk. Unlike the video evidence that had no historical comparison, the 17,000 hours of audio tracts collected from dozens of recorders strategically placed throughout the Big Woods area could be directly compared to audio tracts collected in the 1930’s by Arthur Allen and James Tanner.

After extensive review, the Cornell team was finally convinced and an article was submitted to Science. Although there are still skeptics, the editors at Science, and the professionals throughout the U.S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture agree that the Cornell team has successfully documented the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Now, Dr. Rosenberg argues, the hard work really begins. Recovery will be the difficult process as it relies predominantly on habitat redevelopment. Fortunately there are enough pockets of the birds' original habitat to support a minimal number of breeding pairs, but if true recovery is to occur, then habitat must be recreated through out the lower Mississippi River valley and the Gulf-coast region of the southeastern United States.

Additional information can be found on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology website at: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/

The Cornell authored article can be found in the June 2005 edition of Science.

The Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia provides four degree path programs in forestry and natural resource science and management. These include the forestry, wildlife, fisheries, and water and soil resource programs. With more than fifty faculty and 23,000 acres of teaching lands, WSFR is the oldest, and one of the most respected, forestry and natural resource education providers in the southeastern United States. The school also houses one of the largest study abroad programs in the nation to provide global learning opportunities for its students. For more information visit the WSFR website at www.uga.edu/wsfr.