|
Tapping away at a mystery
|
Ivory-billed woodpeckers, subject of much obsession, take flight in a rendering provided by the journal Science.
FILE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
|
<< This stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker perches at the New York State Museum in Albany, N.Y. It's the best look most people can expect to get.
FILE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
|
Virginian joins search for proof that the ivory-billed woodpecker still exists
By LAURA MOYER
Date published: 11/5/2007
THE FREE LANCE-STAR
FIRST IT WAS the sharp double tap that rang out one January morning in an Arkansas bayou.
Next were the two glimpses in a Florida swamp, quick but unmistakable--the white feather patches on glossy black wings, the white bill and the banking flight pattern.
The experiences came nearly a year apart and they were over in seconds, way too fast for Robert Anderson to make an audio recording or lift a video camera to his shoulder.
Nevertheless, Anderson was certain of what he'd encountered: ornithology's holy grail, the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Anderson, a career biologist and longtime bird observer, spent parts of the past two winters volunteering with teams of researchers seeking to prove that ivory-billed woodpeckers still exist in the American South.
The lordly birds were thought to be extinct, wiped out in 1944 by the logging of their last known old-growth habitat. Sightings since that time had been dismissed as wishful thinking or amateur mistakes; the ivory-billed somewhat resembles the common but less dramatically patterned pileated woodpecker.
But a documented Arkansas sighting of an ivory-billed in 2004 galvanized ornithological circles, raising hopes that a small number had managed to survive in remote pockets of pristine habitat.
Anderson, who lives in the Norfolk area, volunteered to join teams of searchers in Arkansas' Bayou de View in January 2006 and at Florida's Choctawhatchee River in December 2006 and January of this year.
At the invitation of the Fredericksburg Birding Club, he came to the University of Mary Washington's Jepson Science Center on Thursday night to share his experiences with about 60 students, faculty and members of the public.
Joining scientists from Cornell and Auburn universities in those wintertime swamps gave Anderson firsthand knowledge of how tantalizing and frustrating the ivory-billed can be.
Ornithologists from those universities have no doubt about what they and others have seen, but skeptics say, "Prove it."
That's exactly what researchers are trying to do, and it seems as if it shouldn't be that hard. All they need is a clear, crisp and undisputable video or still photo.
But ivory-billeds are few, wary and fast, Anderson said.
An estimate of six pairs in 60 square miles of Choctawhatchee habitat may be optimistic, Anderson said. Scientists have set up unmanned audio and video recording devices at possible roosting cavities, paddled heavily camouflaged kayaks and staked out stationary positions in likely spots, but there just aren't many birds to observe.
And when they do get a glimpse, it's never for long. While pileated woodpeckers in flight flap their wings about five times a second, the rate for ivory-billed woodpeckers is greater than eight times a second, Anderson said.
The birds are keenly attuned to anything unusual in their environment. The movement of a kayak paddle or a brief reflection of sunlight on a metallic camera sends them flying.
| Woodpecker heaven
Arkansas' Bayou de View is "the woodpeckeriest place I've ever seen," Robert Anderson said.
In two wintertime weeks of volunteering to watch for ivory-billed woodpeckers there, Anderson noted numerous woodpecker species and once heard the resonant double rap of the bird he especially sought.
Even without indisputable proof that the ivory-billed woodpecker still lives there, the bayou with its monstrous old bald cypresses and tupelo trees must be protected, Anderson said.
"It's the wildest place I've ever seen."
|
|
Date published: 11/5/2007
|
Star Directory
