Considerate Woodpecker Stays Out of Sight

March 17, 2006 — -- It was an impossible dream come true -- the epitome of the type of wishful thinking you dare not indulge in -- suddenly fulfilled for birders and conservationists. A golden new hope driving out an aching sadness.

The "Lord God" bird -- so-called because that was the exclamation that often burst from the lips of those first spotting it in the virginal woods of the southeastern United States of the 19th century -- had been found! Alive! It lived!

Long thought extinct and long haunting the imagination of birders as they pored through field guides with their precise paintings illustrating the "field marks" for sure identification, the magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker was often called America's most resplendent bird.

Startle one in the damp forests, wrote early American naturalists, and it would astonish you flying past with its great wingspan, bright red cockade, stark white wing patches, long ivory bill -- and a distinctly Jurassic loud and slowly paced honk, a sound more like that of an enormous goose, and the primeval opposite of Woody's mindless hysterical giggle.

The ivory-billed field marks were naturally burned into the memory of American birders, just in case … for the rumors persisted: Someone heard one in Georgia, two were spotted in Louisiana -- or was it along the Mississippi in western Tennessee? Two breeding pairs were said to be seen in the forests of western Cuba, taking asylum there from the relentless U.S. lumbering and swamp-clearing that had decimated their habitat in the United States.

But decades passed, and there was nothing definitive.

Then suddenly in April last year came the news it was still here! Seen by not just one but several professional birders. And there was a Zapruder-like strip of videotape -- now dubbed "the Luneau video" after one David Luneau, an engineering professor who had joined the search -- from a camera mounted on the gunnels of Luneau's canoe. In grainy, out-of-focus footage, there appeared a large black bird with white patches on its wings flapping away into the trees in the middle distance.