Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Sought in Texas

Biologist Jonathan Fredland uses an aerial map to point out the area he and his companions will search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007, in the Big Thicket National Preserve in Southeast Texas. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan) (Pat Sullivan - AP)

Helped by a research grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the hunt began Nov. 1 in the Big Thicket. It has continued through this month even as new leaf growth on trees has made looking for the elusive nomadic bird even more impossible.

"I'm hopeful, neither optimistic nor pessimistic," said John Arvin, a research coordinator for the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory in Lake Jackson, Texas. "I'm not 100 percent convinced. We may not have any (ivory-bills), even though they may be somewhere else, Florida or Arkansas."

The Fish and Wildlife Service is also coordinating searches in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana with assistance from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is supplying equipment to the efforts.

The last confirmed families of ivory-billed woodpeckers were in northeast Louisiana in 1944 in an area known as the Singer Tract, where wood from the Mississippi River bottomland forest was being used for shipping crates by the Singer sewing machine company. The World War II need for wooden ammunition boxes and coffins accelerated removal of trees and likely hastened the demise of the woodpecker colony, Arvin said.

No clear signs of the ivory-billed have surfaced after several months of searching the Big Thicket and monitoring by electronic devices. Shoe-box size cameras belted to tree trunks are aimed at promising cavities carved out by woodpeckers or at areas where bark has been scaled off by birds in search of a beetle snack.

They've captured photos of squirrels and other birds, but no ivory-bills.

Audio devices are deployed in other promising spots and Arvin every two weeks trudges for a mile, some of it in waist-deep water, to install new batteries and retrieve data to be shipped to the Cornell lab for review.

Jonathan Fredland is armed with a video camera and a small radio-like speaker that plays the sound of an ivory-billed woodpecker _ recorded in 1935. It's a distinctive double knock on wood, followed by the bird's "kent" calls, so named because it sounds like the bird is saying, "kent, kent, kent."

"You walk, wait a period, sit down, let everything quiet down because you've been making a lot of noise," Fredland said. "Then you play it _ double knock... Wait five minutes or so. Then play kent calls.

"Then you listen for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. I try to find a spot that's open, maybe by a pipeline, sit in the middle so you can see."

All the while he's holding a video camera, listening for a like response or a rustling in the thick brush or tree canopy, and hoping not to lose a GPS unit or have the batteries expire. That could ensure getting lost in the wilderness.

Confirmation of the bird's existence here would lure biologists from around the world.

"I imagine someone from Cornell or the federal government will come in and seal off the area," Fredland said. "I don't imagine I'd be allowed anywhere near. I hope to have that problem."