Search for woodpeckers moves east
Posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Researchers will begin scouring the tupelo and cypress swamps in the Big Woods of east Arkansas today in hopes of spotting the elusive ivorybilled woodpecker as part of a renewed but scaled-back search effort.
Next month, they’ll be joined by rotating teams of volunteers — about 10 every two weeks — who will assist through the end of the search season in late April.
Similar searches are planned throughout the Southeast, where the bird once thrived but was thought to have disappeared with many of the old-growth swamps.
The Big Woods search will be aided by global positioning systems, high-tech cameras and possibly helicopters, said Allan Mueller, one of the two full-time employees the Nature Conservancy is dedicating to the Arkansas search.
But much of the work will rely on good old-fashioned patience, or, as Mueller puts it, working from “can to can’t” — from the crack of dawn when searchers can see to the onset of dusk or even nightfall when they can’t.
“I think it’s going to be a great year,” he said.
This year, the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, which has led the search, will have just three full-time employees in Arkansas. Audubon Arkansas will have two full-time employees to aid in the effort, state director Ken Smith said.
Last year, there were 20 or so full-time researchers from Cornell and 112 volunteers from around the country over the course of the season.
Connie Bruce, a spokesman for the Cornell lab, said Cornell scientists will be helping search in 18 locations throughout the Southeast.
“The really great thing about all this searching is everybody has recognized we need to find the bird and do an all-out en- compassing search.... The search in Arkansas really incited the search throughout the Southeast,” Bruce said.
Mueller said that getting an indisputable photograph or video is an important goal, but that searchers also need to find a roost hole or signs of foraging to further their research.
In May, researchers announced that they no longer believed a pair of the birds were in the Bayou DeView area of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. The news came after a six-month search failed to yield hard evidence of the birds’ existence.
The bird’s rediscovery — still hotly debated on the Internet and by some noted ornithologists — was announced in 2005. It came after a year of secret searches sparked by Hot Springs kayaker Gene Sparling, who spotted what he thought was an ivory-billed woodpecker flying over the Cache River in 2004.
The main evidence of the bird’s existence is a short, grainy video taken in April 2004 by David Luneau, a professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Critics, including noted bird illustrator David Sibley, have said the video captured a more common pileated woodpecker. Others contend the white blur is a plant.
Believers still abound at Gene’s Barbecue, a popular eatery in Brinkley where diners can order an ivory-billed cheeseburger — made with beef, not bird.
Owner Gene Depriest said Monday that the “home of the ivory-billed” T-shirts, keychains and bumper stickers are still selling well.
While the number of binocular-toters was greater last year, it’s once again picking back up as the leaves come off the trees and more birders flock to town, Depriest said.
Before the 2005 announcement, the last documented sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker came in Louisiana in 1944. Much of what is known about the bird comes from research conducted by Cornell graduate student James Tanner in Louisiana’s Singer tract in the late 1930 s.
Researchers in Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina will begin searches for the woodpecker in the next month, said Tom MacKenzie, a spokesman for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Searching in east Texas began in November and a search will continue in Florida.
Researchers from Alabama have been focusing their attention in the Florida panhandle. This fall, Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University in Alabama and Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor in Ontario said 14 reputed sightings and a number of sound recordings offered evidence the woodpeckers might be living along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida panhandle.
No video or photograph supports the claims.
“Documentation is a key aspect; obviously, everyone wants that million-dollar photograph,” MacKenzie said of the ongoing search efforts.
Laurie Fenwood, the ivorybilled woodpecker coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast region, said that state and federal officials met in South Carolina’s Congaree National Park in August to try to come up with a rating system to determine where the bird is most likely to have survived.
Fenwood said that large, undisturbed areas of bottomland hardwoods along rivers would be good candidates for searching. Areas of historical and recently reported sightings also would be logical places to look.
Although she said that some areas may have few reported sightings, “if people believe something has been extinct, they don’t tend to look for it,” Fenwood said.
How much the service will spend on the search is still being determined, she said. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service spent about $ 225, 000 on the Arkansas search and about $ 350, 000 on searches in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
The service expects to have a recovery plan, with an emphasis on Arkansas’ Big Woods, to the public by the summer.
“This is a preliminary plan and can be informed by what we may learn this search season,” Fenwood said.
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