This winter, 30 full-time research scientists and 112 volunteers–some of them looking from head to toe like balls of shredded camouflage cloth–are combing through thousands of acres of swampy Arkansas woods in search of a bird called Elvis.
That is the affectionate local nickname given to the ivory-billed woodpecker, a spectacularly shy but showy species that scientists thought became extinct around 1944. A dramatic announcement in April that at least one ivory-bill had been spotted here kicked off a massive effort to try to tally how many there are, research how they live and learn how best to protect them.
The rediscovery also has turned into a resurrection of sorts for the rare habitat the woodpecker lives in, galvanizing public and private conservation agencies that for decades had been fighting lonely battles to save a few thousand acres of Arkansas’ swamp forests.
To show what they hope to accomplish, the conservation groups invited reporters to Arkansas last week, hauling them down the rivers and into the woods to see how the searchers look for and study the birds.
Some float silently in canoes and kayaks disguised as logs while their eyes scan the trunks of soaring 1,000-year-old cypress and tupelo trees rooted in shallow water at the river’s edge. Others spend their days hidden in blinds along edges of lakes and flyways.
Those on land trudge through the muck and mire of swamplands away from the river. They peer up at stands of cypress, tupelo and, at slightly higher elevations, oaks and sweetgum, paying special attention to the biggest, oldest, dead and dying trees.
Global positioning units record their travels. Each searcher is armed with video recorders to capture footage of their quarry if they see it, and cell phones to call in others if that happy event should occur.
So far, it hasn’t. No clear new photos of the ivory-billed woodpecker have yet been taken, providing ammunition to some skeptics who say the evidence so far is too scant to prove the species has survived.
Officials with Cornell ornithology labs, which is leading the small army of scientists and volunteer birders currently in Arkansas, note the searchers are combing an area that would cover 75 percent of Rhode Island and have finished looking at only 8 percent of it.
“Winter is the ideal time to look for the bird,” said Cornell biologist Ron Rohrbaugh. “The leaves are off the trees, so visibility is much easier. It’s virtually impossible to see them in the summer, and in the winter the birds are much noisier and easier to hear.”
As much as they want to see the bird, they are just as interested in finding the distinctive oval nesting holes the ivory-bills make in trees. Birds would return to an active hole repeatedly, making detailed observation of their habits possible.
The full-time scientists on the search come from Cornell. The volunteers were rounded up by another Cornell biologist, Sara Barker, who said she had no trouble finding hundreds of biologists and lifelong bird spotters willing to pay their own way to Arkansas to spend two weeks of 18-hour days slogging through swamps.
Audubon’s favorite bird
That a bird could cause such an outpouring of interest and effort is a measure of its unusual charisma, which made it the favorite native bird of pioneering American naturalist John James Audubon.
Audubon first saw ivory-bills in 1820 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, 150 miles south of Brinkley, when the southern bottomland hardwoods still formed a contiguous 24-million-acre forest stretching from the Carolinas to Arkansas.
The crow-size ivory-billed woodpecker seems to be the only animal in the forest able to tear tightly adhered bark from recently dead and dying trees, uncovering huge grubs that make up 75 percent of its diet. Because such trees are not plentiful, the powerful birds fly long distances to find them, with one breeding pair requiring a six-square-mile range in the healthiest forests.
The forests inhabited by the ivory-bill fell relentlessly through the 19th and 20th Century, the massive trees were prime targets for lumber mills and the land drained and converted to agriculture. Then in the 1960s, agribusinesses began finding valuable new uses for soybeans, such as for cooking oil. The price of soybeans shot up from $2 a bushel to $12 a bushel, encouraging area farmers to cut forests and drain swampland for soybean fields.
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Other remnants of forest nearly disappeared in the 1970s when the Army Corps of Engineers began to straighten the Cache River to drain additional swamp. A small group of local hunters, knowing it would destroy winter grounds for migratory ducks, filed suit and successfully blocked the project.
“That fight made a lot of local people see that wildlife had its own value,” said Dennis Widner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who has spent much of his career fashioning and reforesting the refuge along the Cache that grew from that suit.
Conservationists eventually dubbed fragments along the Bayou de View and Cache and White Rivers the Big Woods and began looking for ways to connect them. The Nature Conservancy approached the soybean farmers and found some were interested in selling.
“Those fields were an enterprise that never really paid off because they were on flood plains and many years the crop was destroyed by floods,” said Scott Simon, head of the Arkansas Nature Conservancy.
Sighting kept secret
But nothing compared to the impact of Arkansas kayaker Gene Sparling spotting an ivory-bill in March 2004. When two top birders confirmed the sighting days later, it set an enormous scientific and conservation effort into motion.
Officials kept the discovery a closely held secret for a year while Cornell sent field scientists to look for the bird. Months of intensive searching produced only a few solid eyeball sightings of the woodpecker, a grainy 4.5-second video of one flying away, and some recordings of ivory-bill calls and raps picked up by remote, stationary instruments in the woods.
This winter, with more people looking, better high-tech search and recording gear and more carefully laid plans, scientists are hopeful they will come up with “slam dunk” evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker, namely a clear, unambiguous photo or video.
“We’ve seen this bird. We’ve heard this bird. We know it’s out there,” Rohrbaugh said.
White River National Wildlife Refuge, an area 50 miles south of the area where the bird was originally spotted, may offer the best chance at success. Remote audio recordings of characteristic vocalizations called “kent calls” and the “double-knock” raps the birds use as signals hint strongly of the presence of a mating pair, scientists say.
“Elvis has the rock star appeal to bring attention here,” said Mallard, manager of the refuge. “He is teaching all of us a lot about the ecology of these forests while we’re out there looking for him.”
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The ivory-billed woodpecker
Nickname: Lord God bird. Because of its rarity and striking appearance, people who spotted one were said to declare: “Lord God, what is that bird?” Also: the Grail bird.
Species: Campephilus principalis.
Size: The largest North American woodpecker at 19.5 inches long.
Appearance: Ivory white beak, brilliant yellow eyes. Striking red crest on the male. Trailing white feathers on wings; white streak runs from eye to wings. Strong, straight flight similar to a pintail duck’s. Springs up and down tree trunks.
Song: A nasal yank-yank-yank, similar to that of the white-breasted nuthatch.
Status: 2004 sighting was the first confirmed since 1944, when a lone female in Louisiana disappeared.
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