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Alleged Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sighting (fwd)



By popular demand, here's some information about a 1999 Ivory-billed 
Woodpecker sighting in Louisiana.  First is the article from the Clarion-
Ledger of Jackson, MS, followed by a message from David Muth.  This was 
forwarded to me by Harry LeGrand. Normally this would be off-topic, since it 
doesn't pertain to Carolina birds, but the rules are meant to be bent on 
occasion...  (plus the word "Carolina" is mentioned once)

Will.Cook@duke.edu  Durham, NC

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http://www.clarionledger.com/news/0001/30/30woodpecker.html

Jan. 30, 2000 

Glimpse of ivory stirs up woods  

Biologists trying to confirm sighting of woodpecker  

By Bruce Reid
Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer  

The ghost of the Southern swamps has appeared again.  

Like all ghosts, its existence can neither be confirmed nor denied -- at least 
not yet.  

But what college student David Kulivan saw while turkey hunting in the 
swampy wilds along the lower Pearl River was no ordinary vision. As best he 
can tell, he saw male and female ivory-billed woodpeckers, birds thought by 
many scientists to have disappeared from North America decades ago as the 
last big tracts of old-growth hardwoods were cut.   

"I knew as soon as I saw them it was something I had never seen before," 
Kulivan said last week, recalling the experience last April southwest of 
Picayune, in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area of St. Tammany Parish, 
La.   

Now, federal biologists are considering whether to conduct detailed field 
studies to see if Kulivan really saw the crow-sized king of the woodpeckers, 
with its gleaming yellow eyes and ivory-colored, jackhammer of a bill.   

"We're not ready to discount this observation," said Debbie Fuller, an 
endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  

Fuller said timber cutting in the management area has been curtailed for now. 
If ivory-bills exist there, they've "got as much protection as they're going 
to get right now."  

The ivory-bill has not been declared extinct; it is still on the federal list 
of endangered species.  

There already have been a few forays by scientists and bird experts to the 
area of the sighting, including one Jan. 21, when about a dozen observers 
covered 6,000 acres with no success.   

The last documented U.S. nesting record for the species was in the 1940s in 
an old-growth forest, now logged, just west of Vicksburg. The land now is 
included in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge near Tallulah, La.   

Former Mississippi State University professor Jerry Jackson is among those 
who have held out hope that a few of the woodpeckers have survived. Wispy 
appearances of single ivory-bills or reports of their calls, never confirmed, 
have haunted Jackson and other ornithologists for years.  

Jackson, now at Florida Gulf Coast University, is writing a book on ivory- 
bills. In 1987, he and a graduate student reported that a bird responded in 
kind to a recording of an ivory-bill call for 18 minutes just north of 
Vicksburg.   

To J.V. Remsen, curator of birds at the Louisiana Museum of Natural Science, 
Kulivan's report of ivory-bills is the most credible he's received in 22 
years on the job.  

"He didn't tell anybody for a while, because he didn't think anybody would 
believe him," Remsen said of Kulivan, a Louisiana State University graduate 
student in wildlife studies. "If the kid did make this up, he is a fantastic 
fabricator."   

Remsen said February and March would be prime time to search for ivory-
bills, because it's less buggy and the trees are bare. The birds, if they 
are there, also would be more vocal as breeding season approached.   

"If there's anything wrong with this sighting, it was too good," said Steve 
Shively, a zoologist with the Louisiana Natural Heritage program who is 
helping organize searches for the birds. Still, he said he and others 
believe they have an obligation to "investigate this to the extent 
appropriate."   

Mark Woodry, curator of ornithology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural 
Science, said he's intrigued by Kulivan's report and wants to monitor the 
activities of his counterparts just across the state border.   

For now, Woodry said, no expeditions are planned to search for ivory-bills 
in Mississippi. Most of the dense river forests left in the lower Pearl 
River region are in Louisiana.   

Until now, Kulivan's report has been kept mostly quiet.  

Soon, however, word of the report will spread further. Writing teacher 
Christopher Cokinos of Kansas State University chronicles it in his new 
book, due out in March, on the demise of U.S. birds such as ivory-bills, 
Carolina parakeets and passenger pigeons. The book, called Hope is the Thing 
with Feathers, A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, is to be released 
around the 100th anniversary of the shooting of the last wild passenger 
pigeon, a bird that darkened the skies in Mississippi and elsewhere until 
wiped out by market hunters.   

Cokinos said last week he hopes to visit the lower Pearl region. He said 
he'd like to think Kulivan could have seen ivory-bills.   

Cokinos still receives reports of ivory-bill sightings from Cuba, where 
Jackson and others found the birds in the 1980s. By 1995, many scientists 
thought the birds were extinct there, too.  

If anything, Cokinos said, "I hope talking about ivory-bills will help us 
make a transition to talking about other species that are having 
difficulty." 

For his part, Kulivan is glad his report was not dismissed. Ivory-bills can 
easily be confused with slightly smaller pileated woodpeckers, which are 
surviving fairly well in the remaining hardwood forests and wood lots.   

Kulivan said he's in the woods often enough to know what pileated 
woodpeckers look like. "I know for a fact that it wasn't that."   

The birds were close, 10 yards at one point, before they flew behind him 
after 10 minutes, calling as they went. At least one of them was hammering 
its bill fiercely, "knocking the bark off of the trees."   

For now, biologists like Shively can only imagine the experience of seeing 
an ivory-bill, in all its "manic glory," as Cokinos writes in his book.   

"It would be like seeing a ghost," Shively said. "It would make your hair 
stand on end."  

[end of Clarion-Ledger article]

------------------------------------------

More info on the IBWO woodpecker controversy......

-----Original Message-----
From:	David Muth [SMTP:David_Muth@nps.gov]
Sent:	Wednesday, February 02, 2000 10:13 AM

Now that the bird is out of the bag, so to speak (the story broken by
those crack investigative journalists at the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger!),
I thought you might be interested in a little amplification of the report
and follow-up.

Kullivan's sighting was on April 1, 1999. He was turkey hunting in the
Honey Island swamp, part of the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area,
managed by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.  (This is
the extreme southeastern Louisina -Mississippi border area, about 40 miles
northeast of New Orleans.) Kullivan was sitting with his back to a tree at
dawn, when he spotted the pair about 20 yards away in a water oak. They
then flew over his head and landed in another water oak, calling and
putting on a show for him. His description was pretty nearly flawless, a
mixture of what is in field guides (he described the call as a "nasal
'kent'") and little tidbits not generally found in the guides (the
female's black crest was recurved forward). The birds flew off through the
forest, but he continued to hear them for ten or fifteen minutes. When he
later took off searching for them with a camera, he could not find them.

Kullivan kept mum for a day or two, saying he did not think anyone would
believe him. He finally told one of his wildlife mngt. professors, who had
him write down a description of the birds and circumstances. As this began
circulating around LSU, it was first thought to be an April Fool's joke.
It was a week after the sighting before he had been tracked down and
thoroughly grilled by LSU Museum ornithologists. A group of Ornithology
grad students, several of them with experience of other Campephilus
woodpeckers from the tropics, descended on the area armed with an
Ivory-billed tape and tape players, but found nothing. I joined a larger
search crew on April 18, when we were led by Kullivan himself to the exact
spot. Here is an excerpt of my email account of that day's search:

About 15 of us-- museum and wildlife students and professors, along with 
Kullivan, spent about 4 hours surveying the area.  We played tapes, etc.  
Bottom line: no definitive sighting. About half the party heard campephilus- 
like "double-taps" and a few heard "yank" calls. Of course, they might have 
heard distant tapes...   

Here is my take. Kullivan is very believable, soft-spoken, informed, even- 
tempered, likable, etc. etc. His description of both birds, plus the call is 
so good, that it can't be a case of mistaken pileated i.d. SO..., 1) he 
really saw Ivory-billed, 2) he is a very accomplished pathological liar, 3) 
he is hallucinating, 4) he has convinced himself that he really saw them, 
and "filled in the mental blanks" by consulting the literature. I assign the 
highest probability to option four--99%, about 0.5 to option 1, and 0.25 to 
each of the other 2 option. Several of the people on the search came away 
convinced they had heard something real. I'm a little skeptical.   

The habitat is no great shakes: mixed age second growth, with a scattering 
of big Quercus michauxii and Magnolia virginiana. Most of the trees were 
less than 25" dbh though. There were a number of dead snags, but in four 
hours no one found a tree that had been recently bark-stripped. I found a 
few OLD bark stripped trees, but I could not tell if the bark had fallen 
off, and, in any case, these showed signs of pileated gouging.  The place is 
hardly remote-- you can hear I-59 the whole time, and trains, and the mngt. 
area shooting range.   

We were lucky that it was so dry, because normally it would be hard going 
through these sloughs in April. The highway noise is constant, and when 
vehicles hit the expansion joints, it gives a perfect "double-tap" that at 
great distances comes through the woods w/o the accompanying car sound. 
Could easily fool someone into thinking they are hearing the woodpeckers.   

Organized and ad hoc searches continued last spring, until summer made 
searching pretty impossible. I also flew over the area in a small plane with 
BRD personnel. Its an impressively large tract of forest. The WMA covers the 
lower third of the basin, and just north of there is the Bogue Chitto NWR. 
There is a lot of forest, which from the air looks unbroken. On the ground, 
though, you can see that logging has not left a lot of older growth--even 
where there have been no clear-cuts in decades, there has been selective 
logging. However, in some of the sloughs, there are impressive old, mis- 
shapen and therefore un-marketable baldcypress and water tupelo.   

This winter, after deer season, new systematic searches were organized by the 
LWF Natural heritage staff, covering areas to the south. Much of this habitat 
looks better to me, with more large trees, a lot of standing dead timber, and 
beaucoup woodpeckers--an amazing density of Red-bellied Woodpeckers, with 
plenty of pileated and flickers, downy and hairy. Much of the area we were 
able to search is usually underwater in winter and spring, or at least so 
disected by deep sloughs as to be impassable. However, our prolonged drought 
allowed us to get into areas that are normally inaccessible.  

Could Ivory-billed still be there, hiding out lo these many decades? I give 
it a qualified yes. There is a lot of forest, and much of it is usually 
inaccessible. Just as importantly, most of it is visited by local hunters 
and fishers, but not by people who would recognize IBWO. Birders routinely 
visit along the one small road network, but primarily during breeding 
season. The area has an extraordinarily high density of breeding bottomland 
species, especially the much sought after Swainson's Warbler. But if the 
woodpeckers were just a few miles south or north of that road, no one would 
know.   

I still think Kullivan did not really see Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, but that 
he sincerely believes he did. However, my opinion is worth absolutely 
nothing in this matter, and is based more on my gut feeling about the 
probabilities than any objective evidence. A number of skeptical 
professional ornithologists who questioned him closely in the early days are 
quite convinced, and they are in a better position to judge him. In any 
case, I haven't given up searching...   

Incidentally, I've always thought it would be great place for re-discovering 
Bachman's Warbler...   

David

Incidentally, I share this with you folks on Keith's mailing list, but its 
not really my story to tell. Until the Clarion-Ledger story was picked up on 
Tex-Birds, the network of those told about the details had stayed relatively 
contained, though it was hardly a secret. Back in the seventies the IBWO 
sightings in Big Thicket caused something of a sensation, with a lot of 
dubious follow-up sightings. One can only imagine what might happen today, 
with thousands of rabid listers and many more thousands of the curious and 
the romantic wanting to see an Ivory-billed--who can blame them. It is 
inevitable now, I'm afraid. But if any of you on this list want specific 
directions or more details, email me privately.   

**************************************************

David Muth
New Orleans

Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve