Extinct? After 60 Years, Woodpecker Begs to Differ

The Interior and Agriculture departments said they will spend about $15 million on preserving the bird's habitat.

Ivory bills rarely live longer than 15 years, so there have clearly been breeding pairs as late as the 1990s. Whether any remain is unknown. Young birds stay with their parents about two years and afterward are not prolific.

"If a pair raises two young in a year, it will be a good year," said Martjan Lammertink, 33, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Amsterdam sojourning in the United States. Observations from the 1930s suggest that a pair needs about 4,000 acres of forest. Because only 10 to 15 percent of the Big Woods system is ideal habitat, it seems likely there could be, at most, a dozen pairs.

The ivory bill is the largest woodpecker in North America, about 20 inches in height and with a wingspan as wide as 33 inches. It has piercing yellow eyes and a white pattern on its glossy black body that looks like a white heel when the wings are folded. The male is especially distinctive because of its brilliant, blood-red crest. The bird has an unusual, nasal toy-trumpet call.

Nancy Tanner, widow of famed Cornell University ornithologist James J. Tanner, who chronicled his encounters with the vanishing bird in the 1930s and '40s, once recalled that the ivory bills were nicknamed "King of the Woodpecker" and "Lord God Bird" because "that's what people blurted out when they saw the bird."

Tens of thousands of ivory bills once prowled the nation's southern forests. With their strong necks and sharp bills, they lived on a hard-to-exploit food source -- the insects and larvae invading newly dead, but not yet rotten, hardwoods. A description of ivory bills in a 1917 book noted that at the foot of the ancient trees, "huge piles of bark and slabs of wood are found which give convincing evidence of its power as a feathered axman."

As the old-growth bottomlands were logged, the habitat disappeared, and with it the bird. There were occasional reports of sightings in Texas, Florida, South Carolina and elsewhere, but invariably they proved impossible to confirm.

In January 2002, a team of the world's most experienced bird experts spent a month wading through 35,000 acres of southern Louisiana swamp in hopes of confirming a reported sighting by a 21-year-old forestry student at Louisiana State University. The team, organized by LSU, Cornell University and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, failed to turn up conclusive evidence.

"It was not only like looking for a needle in a haystack," said James Van Remsen Jr., an ornithologist at LSU, "but a moving needle in a haystack."

Then Gene M. Sparling, 49, a red-bearded father of two from Hot Springs, Ark., got lucky.

He was on the second day of a four-day solo paddle through the Big Woods in February 2004. It was about 1 p.m. and overcast. He was drifting down a small stream that had flooded the woods.

"I had just set my paddle down and had leaned back in my seat and was thinking what a beautiful, fantastic, awe-inspiring place this was," he said yesterday.

Out of the treetops came a huge woodpecker, straight at him. It landed on a tree trunk about 60 feet away. Sparling's camera was in rubber bag on his lap, but he did not go for it. Instead he looked at the bird and noted its markings before it moved up the trunk, playing peekaboo with him, and flew away.

For the next two days, Sparling argued with himself. He knew what he had seen was not a pileated woodpecker -- the ivory bill's almost-as-impressive cousin -- but he could not believe it was an ivory bill.

When he got home, he wrote up his trip for the Arkansas Canoe Club's Web site. He described what he had seen but did not name the bird. Word got around.

"I'm here to tell you wonderful amazing things can happen in this world," Sparling said.