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Tapping away at a mystery

November 5, 2007 12:35 am

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.

Anderson himself has come frustratingly close to success. On Jan. 3 of this year, a "dead calm day," Anderson said, he was drifting alone down a creek off Florida's Choctawhatchee, video camera in hand and rolling. He set the camera in his lap to push a branch out of his way, and that's when he saw it.

"It was obvious to me that what I was seeing was all the classic marks of the ivory-billed woodpecker," he said. He was close enough to see its individual tail feathers.

But before he could lift the camera, it was gone.

"The bird is adept at getting vegetation between you and it as quickly as possible," he said.

While he has no doubt of what he saw, Anderson said, "The problem, of course, is documenting it."

He's confident that will happen, but where, when or to whom is unknowable.

"It's going to take somebody with patience, who is well-concealed and who is very lucky," he said, "to prove that this Lazarus bird has come back from the dead."