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.

A phalanx of ornithologists from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology -- America's holiest temple of the avian sciences -- had studied the video and all the reports and pronounced it indeed the ivory-billed.

There was a peer-reviewed article published in June in America's premier scientific journal, Science.

But no. Maybe.

Now, in a new peer-reviewed article in America's premier scientific journal Science, America's most-noted living birder, no less -- one David Sibley -- says it ain't so.

Sibley has spent his life honing his powers of close observation of birds -- often birds in flight; his newly pre-eminent field guides are noted especially for his depictions of the differing flight styles of different species.

Sibley's magisterial and definitive "Sibley Guide to Birds" is generally acknowledged to have taken the mantle -- if anyone has -- from the legendary Roger Tory Peterson's series of field guides.

In his closely reasoned new article, "Comment on "Ivory-billed Woodpecker … ," Sibley and co-authors Louis Bevier, Michael Patten and Chris Elphick lay out all the reasons to conclude that the ecstatic sightings and beliefs of last summer were all spurred by a spotting of the similar but somewhat smaller and grayish-billed pileated woodpecker -- not the ivory-billed.

Not budging, in the same new issue of Science, Cornell's John Fitzpatrick, lead author of last June's jubilant article, and co-authors volley back, in "Response to 'Comment on Ivory-billed Woodpecker … ,'" that the bird on the videotape is indeed the ivory-billed.

Fitzpatrick, Martjan Lammertink, M. David Luneau Jr., Tim Gallagher and Kenneth Rosenberg, employing the same sort of side-by-side picture analysis wielded by Sibley, Bevier, Patten and Elphick, patiently explain how Sibley's team has misinterpreted the Luneau Video, specifically in mistaking the white patches on the flapping wings for those of the pileated's underwing pattern.

The pileated has no white patches on its overwing, but the ivory-billed does, and Fitzpatrick et al insist the white patches on the bird seen flapping away in the Luneau video are on the overwing.

Now this is a genuine scientific controversy.

The ivory-billed … or pileated … or whatever it was last year that got everyone so excited … has, thoughtfully, stayed out of sight.

Thus allowing for the development of the full-blooded scientific fisticuffs.

This is not to belittle what this is all about. The conservation efforts such as those by the hundreds of people and organizations who had preserved the natural river bottom forests in which the hopeful sightings were made, and that helped make the survival of the ivory-billed at least a possibility, are sorely needed.

Such efforts are too few and far between in a country that still fails to recognize that its "national heritage" includes all of its natural heritage.

But despite the continuing searches of the hundreds of ornithologists, weekend birders and newly minted Woodpecker knickknack salesmen who have flooded the southern forest where whatever it was was spotted last year, none has produced in video or snapshot or field notes -- yet -- a second sighting of ... whatever it was.

As that most brilliant and elusive birdlike American genius, the poet Emily Dickenson, wrote:

"Hope … is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul …"