WASHINGTON: Scientists say they have spotted the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker 14 times in the last year in the Florida panhandle, raising hope that the rare bird is truly back from the brink of extinction.
"The bird just flew over my head; I was in my kayak and it was just above me, going away," said Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University, whose team spied the bird in the flooded forests along the Choctawhatchee River in May 2005.
Hill said he was within 9m of the woodpecker at that sighting, but failed to get a photograph, a key piece of evidence to document the bird’s comeback.
"It’s a hard bird to get a photograph of," Hill said by telephone late on Wednesday. "My excuse, and we are making excuses because we had a chance last year to get a picture, is that we had insufficient personnel and insufficient equipment. We could have gotten lucky. It didn’t happen."
Bird experts had deemed the ivory bill - a crow-sized creature with a characteristic white beak, a red crest and a 76cm wingspan - extinct for half a century until one was seen in eastern Arkansas in 2004.
With great fanfare, the Audubon Society and the journal Science declared in 2005 that the woodpecker was back, but despite repeated sightings, there has been no iron-clad proof of its existence, such as a clear photograph.
In research published online in Avian Conservation and Ecology, a Canadian journal, Hill and his colleagues reported 14 sightings and 41 sounds that matched descriptions of the acoustics of the ivory bill.
They also recorded what sounded like 99 double knock and 210 kent calls, both characteristic sounds produced by the ivory bill. But that may not be enough to convince sceptics, Hill said. "I don’t expect the ornithological community to accept this as definitive."
John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who has led the search for the woodpecker in Arkansas, hailed the Florida find as strong evidence.
"It’s tantalising, it’s suggestive, it’s not conclusive, but in the aggregate, evidence is strong that the bird is there," Fitzpatrick said in a telephone interview.
"I just believe that it is a very important priority for us to search all of the places where this bird may be hanging on, and once and for all find out where they still exist, if they do."
