Ivory-billed Woodpecker Identification Questioned

In a peer-reviewed technical comment in the March 17 I issue of the journal Science , bird identification expert David Sibley and three co-authors, including Chris Elphick, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, argue that the identification last spring of an ivory-billed woodpecker is in doubt.

A video of the bird taken in the Big Woods of Arkansas most likely shows a fairly common pileated woodpecker, they wrote.

Last spring's identification of the ivory-bill was widely reported in the press and led to announcements of more than $10 million in funding from federal and private agencies to preserve the rare bird and its remaining habitat.

The paper by Sibley, Elphick, and co-authors from the University of Oklahoma and Colby College maintains that the prime documented evidence of the ivory-bill, a video cited in a Science article last June, actually shows wing patterns of the slightly smaller but similar pileated woodpecker.

The four-second video was taken in April 2004 by an engineering professor from the University of Arkansas who was a co-author of the original Science paper, along with Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology scientists and others. It has been extensively analyzed, frame by frame, by the Sibley group and the scientists leading the Cornell group.

Whether the bird was an ivory-billed or a pileated woodpecker could affect conservation efforts in the Big Woods, one of the last remaining large tracts of old-growth, bottomland hardwood forest in the South. It is the type of habitat that was favored by the ivory-bill, which was the largest woodpecker in the U.S. The last documented sighting of the bird in this country was in Louisiana some 60 years ago . The bird was thought to have declined because the woodlands were extensively harvested for lumber.

Both groups of scientists say that the conservation efforts in Arkansas should continue and that the habitat is important for many species of wildlife, whether or not ivory-billed woodpeckers occur there.

Elphick, who won a prestigious Partners in Flight award last year for his research on bird conservation, said it was "devastating" to find, after carefully examining the Cornell video, that the bird did not appear to be an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The Sibley paper is the result of two independent teams that began careful examination of the evidence shortly after the Cornell find was announced. Sibley, who is often called the successor to Roger Tory Peterson, the famed late bird illustrator and field guide author, visited Arkansas and observed many pileated woodpeckers over eight days, but no ivory-bill.

When he returned and reexamined the Cornell video, he recognized the flight pattern and markings as those of the birds he had just observed, pileated woodpeckers.

The two birds are both large woodpeckers and all but the female ivory-bill have red crests. The pileated is often referred to as the "Woody the Woodpecker" bird, but the ivory-bill is larger, with an ivory bill and a different black and white wing pattern.

Elphick, who was an editor of Sibley's best-selling The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior , said that the appearance of extensive white on the wings of the bird in the video led him at first to think it was an ivory-bill. Upon closer examination, he saw that everything in the video could be considered normal for a pileated woodpecker, and that some clear features matched those of a pileated but not of an ivory-billed woodpecker.

A key feature on which the groups differ is the pattern of black and white on the wings.

News of the ivory-bill paper spread quickly, with one of the first reports appearing in The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/science/16cnd-bird.html