April 29, 2005
"Extinct" Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Sighted
"This is huge. Just huge," said Frank Gill, senior ornithologist at the Audubon Society. "It is kind of like finding Elvis."
It is just a hop, skip and a jump, as a woodpecker flies, from the last reliable sighting of the bird in Louisiana in 1944.
The large black-and-white birds have distinctive white wing patches and measure at least 20 inches (50 cm) in height. Males have a red crest.
"This is the most spectacular creature we could ever imagine rediscovering," John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology in New York told a news conference.
"For three generations this bird has been a symbol of the great old forests of the southern United States," he added.
"It is a flagship of the blunders of excess of overharvesting. Nothing could be more hoped for than this Holy Grail."
As the name suggests, the birds have ivory-colored bills that help distinguish them from the similar but much more common pileated woodpecker.
They specialize in digging the bark off tall hardwoods that have died, and a breeding pair needs a large territory.
They specialize in digging the bark off tall hardwoods that have died, and a breeding pair needs a large territory.
The survival of ivory bills is closely tied to that of the deep, swampy forests it lived in. The Big Woods area where the sightings occurred was heavily logged in the 19th and early 20th century but many of its tall hardwoods have grown back since then.
Gene Sparling, the amateur naturalist who made the sighting that got the experts convinced the birds had survived, was canoeing in a remote, bug- and snake-infested area. "It was a spiritual experience," he said.
He posted his sighting on the Internet and caught the interest of Tim Gallagher, of Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology and his friend Bobby Harrison, a college professor and keen bird-watcher .
Sparling took them to where he saw the bird and one almost immediately flew toward them. "We almost fell out of the canoe," Gallagher said.
By April one had been videotaped. The report of the sighting is published in the journal Science.
~Ha-ha. ha-ha-ha.
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~I read somewhere Walter Lantz based "Woody Woodpecker" on the Ivory-Billed. Woody Woodpecker Lives! However this site suggests Woody had a more romantic, less tragic, beginning.
Posted by Cieciel at April 29, 2005 05:29 AM