Hunt And Peck

In April 1944, Don Eckelberry, who illustrated the early Audubon field guides, trekked to the Singer Tract and saw what the scientific community long assumed was the last bird, a lone female, calling for a mate that was no longer there. Eckelberry nailed the essence of the bird in his description: "She came trumpeting into the roost, her big wings cleaving the air in strong direct flight, and she alighted with one magnificent upward swoop. Looking about wildly with her hysterical pale eyes, tossing her head from side to side, her black crest erect to the point of leaning forward, she hitched up the tree at a gallop."

One of the kids who had accompanied Eckelberry to the site later returned. The roost tree, he recalled, had blown down in a wind storm. And the curtain went down on the ivory-billed. Or so we thought.

Knock, Knock

Of course, there were rumors, glimpses, mirages. They thought the bird might have reappeared in the Big Thicket woods in east Texas, but reports were never substantiated. On April Fool's Day in 1999, a 20-year-old forestry student said he saw the bird while out hunting in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area north of New Orleans, which sparked a widely publicized search there in 2002, sponsored by the binocular manufacturer Zeiss, and . . . nada.

Encouraging double-knocks picked up by researchers' sophisticated microphones on the Pearl were later shown to be not woodpecker drums but rifle blasts. "It was like chasing a ghost," says David Luneau, an expert birder and obsessed ivory-billed chaser, as well as a professor at the University of Arkansas, who participated in the Zeiss hunt and later, the successful one in the Big Woods.

And so it went -- chasing ghosts -- until the afternoon of Feb. 11, 2004, when a shiitake mushroom farmer from Hot Springs named Gene Sparling was slipping through the Bayou de View woods in his kayak. By his own admission, Sparling is a novice at bird identification. "It was just a wonderful sublime moment of contentment, just in awe, feeling like I was the luckiest person in the world, for just being there," Sparling recalls. "And just then this large woodpecker came into view. My god, that's the largest pileated woodpecker I've ever seen. Flared its wings, landed on the base of a tree. Sixty feet away. Long neck, red crest with a particularly fine point. Thing I noticed most was that the back was white, parchment white, and he seemed particularly animated. He gave several quick jerks, and flew away, his profile was long and straight, rather than undulating. I thought, could that be the ivory-billed woodpecker? But no, they were extinct. And have been all my life."

But Sparling posted an obscure note on a canoe Web site, which wound its way to the odd couple of Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Bobby Harrison, a photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama. Gallagher, lean and Yankee, and Harrison, Falstaffian and as Southern as grits, had been traveling around the swamps for years, tracking down rumors of ivory-billeds. After speaking with Sparling, they were back with him in the Big Woods on Bayou de View within the month. On their second day out, eureka. "We both cried out simultaneously, IVORY BILL!" Gallagher writes in his book "The Grail Bird."

Under the auspices of the Cornell bird lab and the Nature Conservancy, a search was launched in April 2004 to document the finding. Absolute secrecy was required, they felt, or the place would be inundated with thousands of birders, or worse, they would be laughed out of academe as just another false report. Members of the team (which would number about 50 part-timers and 30 full-time) were required to sign confidentiality agreements. Once on site at Brinkley, they even moved out of their motels, fearful that the locals would suspect something was up (after all, it was duck season, and nobody in the Elvis search team was carrying shotguns; the Nature Conservancy bought them an old house).

Some of the best birders in the world went after the ivory-billed equipped like a NASA mission to the moon, slogging through the swamps of the Cache and White River national wildlife refuges and state lands, loaded with cameras, telescopes, recordings of the bird calling (made in 1935 and used to entice a response). They placed super-sensitive listening devices in the trees and recorded thousands of hours of swampy blurps and cackles and groans. They hunted for nests and roosts and signs of stripped bark. They were up in airplanes and used satellite data, searching for what they thought (from the Tanner papers of the 1940s) would be prime habitat.

Showing a reporter around the swamp, Martjan Lammertink of the University of Amsterdam and Cornell, a recognized authority on large woodpeckers (the extinct Imperial in Mexico and the living Great Slaty in Indonesia), came back to the same puzzle: How can Elvis be so elusive?

Lammertink never saw one. Lord God, he tried.

Neither did the head of the expedition, John Fitzpatrick of Cornell. Neither did any of the members of Cornell's crack birding team known as the Sapsuckers. In all, the searchers, drawn from across the country, were out there 240 days, which equals more than 3,000 "person days" of observation.

What did they get? Seven sightings.

There were no recordings of the kent call. Maybe a couple of double-knock drummings (other woodpeckers also peck bark, and the woods here contain not only ivory-bills, but hairy, red-bellied, pileated, red-headed, downy and sapsucker woodpeckers).

Lammertink estimates that in 2005 the chances of a trained observer seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker on any given day is 1 in 1,013.

So, good luck.

They did get four seconds of blurry video, which was shot almost by accident by Luneau and had to be analyzed for months, in slow-motion and freeze-frame, like the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, but which is the best documentation so far and was used to support their paper in April in the journal Science. (In an ideal world, there would be a crisp photo or clear video, but nobody's been able to get either yet.)

"I don't know why we can't find the bird more consistently," Lammertink says. His best guess: the ivory-billed woodpecker is flying long commutes, looking for its dead trees stuffed with beetles, and they're seeing him, and maybe her, as they make their way back and forth, through a narrow stretch of swamp. There's 500,000 acres out there. The team has searched only a fraction of it. But even so, Lammertink says the whole Big Woods might be able to support only a dozen adult pairs and their young, which would explain how they remain the rarest of the rare.

But there is some good news. The wildlife refuges of the Big Woods are growing; each year there are more acres set aside and the trees grow older, bigger, more beetley. The habitat improves, ever so slowly. So the ivory-billed woodpecker, with its hysterical eyes, maybe has a shot. Or not. It has fooled us before.