In search of an elusive, mythical woodpecker

| MCCLATCHY FILE

• TRACKING A GHOST
  
  Learn more about the fabled ivory-billed woodpecker and efforts to find what has been described as the Elvis and Bigfoot of the bird world by going to these Web sites:

  • featheredghosts.blogspot.com is Mark VanderVen's journal of the five months the Bellingham resident spent last winter in the Florida Panhandle searching for the ivory-billed.
    
  • birds.cornell.edu/ivory is Cornell Lab of Ornithology's site, which showcases its search and arguments that its researchers have found evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker's existence.
    
  • auburn.edu\ivorybill takes you to Auburn University's site devoted to its search for the ivory-billed. VanderVen was hired by Auburn University to search the Florida Panhandle last year.

"The ultimate goal was to get a photograph and, hopefully beyond that, find a nest," he says.

If he had taken a picture, a clear one, VanderVen would possess the holy grail of the birding world — hard proof that North America’s largest woodpecker hadn’t gone the way of the extinct dodo. Ditto with a nest.

ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME

VanderVen, whose classes include a natural history of birds of the Pacific Northwest, was hired by Auburn University to search for the crow-sized woodpecker. That meant paddling through swamps dominated by cypress and tupelo trees, which are essential to the bird’s habitat, keeping his eyes open not only for the prize but for alligators and venomous snakes such as water moccasins.

He was gone from January to May. (Searches for the birds usually last through winter because it's easier to see them, provided they exist, when the lush growth of the swamps haven't leafed out.)

"It was very rural, very much the old South," he says. "It was beautiful."

The search was a lifelong dream.

"I always wanted to go look for this thing. I did it for the adventure. I certainly got my money's worth. I wanted to help find it," VanderVen says.

He can count himself among a legion of scientists and the curious who have struck out in search of the legendary bird known for its size, its striking looks — the males have red crests and black and white markings on their wings and necks — and what it represents about the disappearance of a land.

"It's a showy, conspicuous bird when (it's) around. In some ways, it's iconic of the southern swamp country which itself is imperiled. As goes the southern swamps, goes the ivory-billed," says Peter McBride, a Bellingham resident and habitat specialist who searched for the bird in 2002.

He was part of a team that scoured Pearl River Wildlife Management Area in Louisiana during a 30-day hunt funded by Zeiss Sports Optics.

THEY HUNT, THEY HOPE

Interest in finding the crow-sized woodpecker has been red-hot since April 1999, when a Louisiana State University student out hunting in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area in Louisiana reported seeing one.

"It was a remarkably detailed and accurate report. Whether or not everyone wants to believe that, that's their choice," says McBride, a Bellingham resident who searched in the same area six years ago. The bird had been declared extinct by then. Its disappearance blamed on logging that destroyed its habitat.

The first sighting convinced scientists, including McBride, to search "the Pearl."

Then in February 2004, a kayaker saw what may have been an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. That convinced the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy to launch a year-long search in the area.

Their team reported seeing multiple, though fleeting, glances of what members say is the ivory-billed. Members video-taped what they say is the sought-after bird, though the image is blurry and grainy. They also recorded what they believed to be the double knock made by the woodpecker.

Those factors led the team to conclude that at least one ivory-billed woodpecker lived still in the Big Woods of Arkansas' Mississippi River Delta.

But there was no direct proof — no clear image, no nest.

As a result, not everyone is convinced, including McBride and VanderVen.

"I'm a scientist. The evidence thus far is not satisfactorily conclusive. There's lots and lots of leads and some lines of evidence, but they certainly are not so compelling that everyone can agree," says McBride, who worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources in Sedro-Woolley. "I would like to see firmer corroboration of its existence," McBride says.

In 2002, McBride and three other searchers were stopped in their tracks when they thought they heard the bird's loud, distinct rapping.

The Cornell lab had recorders spread around different places in the Pearl, including one closer to the source of the sound. Later analysis indicated it was likely made by automatic gunfire that sounded like something else once it had filtered through the swamp to McBride and the others.

And VanderVen? He didn’t see one either.

"There are people who believe it still exists," VanderVen says. "I'm not one of them. I think it's gone the way of the dodo."