A New Ivory-Bill Sighting
Is this a case of déjà vu all over again? Geoff Hill, an ornithologist from Alabama's Auburn University, is lead author on a paper published in Avian Conservation & Ecology that presents evidence of a population of ivory-billed woodpeckers in a remote river basin along the Choctawhatchee River near the town of Bruce, in the Florida panhandle. (The scientists will not reveal the exact location for fear of disturbing the birds.) Hill and his team present acoustic evidence and documented sightings, just as Cornell's team had when they announced ivory-bill sightings in Arkansas in April 2005. What they don't have, however, is the smoking gun-a photograph or video of the bird.

Even so, says John Fitzpatrick, the director of Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology, which has led the ivory-bill search for the past two years, "The news coming out of Florida is very encouraging and is getting everyone psyched about this new search season. One thing this is doing is broadening the focus to search the whole range of the bird."

Hill and research assistants Tyler Hicks and Brian Rolek were kayaking a section of the Choctawhatchee River in May 2005 when Rolek spotted an ivory-bill in flight and then Hill heard a double-knock. They then noted very large cavities (more than five inches high and four inches wide-too big for pileated woodpeckers) in trees and bark scaling on recently dead trees-a characteristic ivory-bill feeding technique. Their discovery prompted a yearlong search. Hill invited Daniel Mennill, an ornithologist at Ontario's University of Windsor, to join him. Mennill, an expert in bioacoustics, erected seven listening stations in the area where the ivory-bill sightings were occurring.

From May 2005 to April 2006 the Auburn-Windsor search team documented 14 sightings, identified more than 300 sounds that are strikingly similar to those associated with ivory-bills and other members of the campephilus genus (including kent calls and double-knocks), monitored 20 cavities that fit within the ivory-bill's size range, and noted numerous examples of bark scaling. "Tantalizing seems to be an overused word these days, but the observations and data from Florida, as well as from Arkansas, are truly tantalizing," says Jerome Jackson, an ornithologist from Florida Gulf Coast University and author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. "Among the promising evidence are recordings of double-knock raps, apparently being given by two birds in response to one another, and kent vocalizations."

"Using sound-analysis software to scan the recordings from the swamp, for the first few weeks we only isolated sounds of branches breaking and gunshots firing," says Mennill. "But by the middle of January we had a breakthrough. My students starting isolating double-knocks that sounded just like the double knocks I've heard from pale-billed woodpeckers in Costa Rica. We knew we were on to something big." There are no known historical recordings of double-knocks made by ivory-bills, so researchers use other campephilus species, like pale-billed woodpeckers, which also make double-knocks for comparison.

Geoff Hill calls his first season searching for ivory-bills along the Choctawhatchee River a success because "we repeatedly relocated birds, made many sound recordings, and found abundant evidence of the birds' presence." But he also calls that first season a "dismal failure" because of his team's failure to obtain a clear picture of an ivory bill. This winter his team will use remote-imaging cameras borrowed from Cornell. "Our only goal for this coming winter and spring is to get that elusive clear image," Hill adds. "Everything else-enumerating the population, assessing the habitat use, making management plan-begins after we prove that the birds exist."

What do searchers from Arkansas who started the whole ivory-bill craze think? "This is what we wanted to happen," says Bobby Harrison, who made national headlines as one of the seven people in the world who insisted on having seen the ivory-bill there. "This second find confirms what I have believed for the last decade: that ivory-bills might be making a comeback. Will the critics be silenced? Maybe yes and maybe no. Some critics will not be satisfied until they hold a dead ivory bill in their own hand." To see photographs taken during the Florida search and listen to recordings, visit http://www.auburn.edu/ivorybill. -Rachel Dickinson .

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