Auburn group believes it has sighted ivory-billed woodpecker
In an article scheduled to be published Tuesday in the scholarly journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, the main author and group leader, ornithologist Geoff Hill, says the evidence includes a collection of 210 separate recordings of the birds’ vocalization, known as “kent calls,” as well as 99 recordings of “double raps,” a sound the birds are thought to make when their bills hit a tree. Hill also says he and others in the group sighted the birds 14 times in mid-2005 and again between December 2005 and April 2006, when the group set up a permanent camp in the Choctawhatchee basin south of the Alabama state line near Geneva. “I am 100 percent positive that I saw an ivory-bill,” Hill told The Star in an interview from his campus office, recounting a sighting in early January 2006. He added that the group also made two separate sightings of pairs of the birds flying together. The last known recording of an ivory-billed woodpecker was in Louisiana in a swampy area known as the Singer Track in 1935. Only occasional sightings of the birds were reported after that, so few that many scientists concluded the species was extinct. Renewed interest in the bird emerged in the late 1990s, with a reported sighting in Louisiana and then last year in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. That research included blurry video footage and recordings of kent calls. Hill, however, believes that what his team found in the Choctawhatchee is stronger than what has been presented from Arkansas because of the multi-layered body of evidence his team collected. “I think we have the best evidence suggesting an ivory-bill may exist since the Singer Track,” said Hill, the author of dozens of journal articles as well as three books on birds. Ken Rosenberg is the director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a member of the Ivory Bill recovery team, which was organized by the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service. “This research seems very encouraging, but by itself is not definitive. Some of the audio recordings sound perfect. So in terms of clarity, they are very nice recordings. But when you try to match them against the 1935 recording, it isn't exact.”
The Cornell lab is eager to work with the Auburn researchers and has given technical advice and is supplying equipment for the upcoming research trip, he said. He also said, “That environment is very conducive to them. Those rivers in the Florida Panhandle were the mother load of the ivory-bill woodpecker.” Although it had camera equipment, Hill says the team “did not get that clear a picture,” of the bird. “We set out to prove that there are ivory-bills there. In that, we failed. It was a success, however, in that we have evidence.” While praising the support of Auburn (the university provided a grant of $10,000 from a discretionary fund) Hill said that, “If we would have had more people and money we would have found what was making those kent calls and those double knocks.” He also added, “I can’t imagine how we could be wrong,” and asked, “What else could be making that noise? Nothing in nature we know of. There might be something we don’t know of.” Without clear photographic evidence, Hill says he knows there will be a lot of criticism of his team’s findings, but he also says he welcomes that criticism. His colleague and co-author of the journal article, Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor in Ontario, said in a telephone interview that, “We expect a lot of questions and a lot of skeptics. But we appreciate a healthy degree of skepticism.” Jerome A. Jackson, a professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, an ornithologist and the author of the book, In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, was a critic of the research findings in Arkansas. “Arkansas is on the fringe of what was known to be the range of the ivory-bill,” Jackson said from the Atlanta airport on his way to give a lecture in Alaska. “The heart of ivory-bill country is in the Florida Panhandle. I would expect them to show up there,” said Jackson, considered by many to be a foremost expert on ivory-bills. Although Jackson calls the Auburn findings, “very exciting,” he cautions that, “it is not conclusive.” Hill and Mennill also point to the recordings that suggest more than one possible ivory-billed woodpecker, especially recordings on 11 days when the team recorded kent calls and double knocks on the same recording device. Additionally, they say, on two occasions the kent calls of two birds were heard at the same time. David Sibley, a well-known illustrator of birds, who is also a critic of the Arkansas research, wrote in an email to The Star that since he hadn’t seen Hill’s research yet, he couldn’t comment. He did add, however, that, “As far as I know bird identification experts are all in agreement that we’re still looking for proof that the ivory-billed survives, so if people can actually present proof from Florida that would be absolutely thrilling. The evidence from Arkansas should have been scrutinized more carefully before it was announced last year.” “That evidence doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and really doesn’t justify the claims of proof, and it simply raised a lot of false hopes.” Although the research team initially offered the findings and were ultimately rejected by the journal Nature, the strength of the audio, says Mennill and Hill, is one reason they decided to turn to Avian Conservation & Ecology, an on-line scientific journal. “It is an online journal capable of handling all of our research, including our audio recordings,” said Hill. Merrill adds that, “we have put all of our research out there for everyone to see.” As for the future, Hill plans to continue the research. While stressing that this is an Auburn University project, he hopes that publication of the article may bring in private, state and federal money. He and the team are planning to return to the area for a long-term research trip later this year. “Now we have to go back, said Hill. “Now our job is to go find what the source of all these knocks, and kent calls and what exactly these big birds are.” |
||||
How the Auburn team decided to explore the remote area south of Geneva, near Bruce, Fla., is an interesting story in itself. As ornithologist Geoff Hill tells it, he was a new professor in the mid-1990s at Auburn, laboring under a workload, trying to make tenure, juggling family and job, when one day he received a call from a man in Geneva County, whom he described as some guy in a pickup truck. The man in the pickup told a skeptical Hill that he had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker; that it was big and it flew away from him into an old growth forest along the Pea River near the city of Geneva in south Alabama. “I tried to talk him out of it,” said Hill. “I suggested that he might have seen a pileated woodpecker,” he said, explaining that the pileated woodpeckers have similar markings. The man in the pickup, however, wasn’t buying it, Hill explained. He told Hill he knew what a pileated woodpecker looked like and that what he saw was no pileated woodpecker. “I just couldn’t handle it right then,” said Hill. “But I filed it in the back of my head.” Last year, when news of the possible discovery broke in Arkansas, Hill said he thought again of the report from Geneva and started considering a trip to the area. “I had people urging me to go to Arkansas, but I really didn’t want to be part of a bird event,” he said. So in May 2005, he and two research assistants loaded up kayaks on his car and headed for southeast Alabama. They floated an area west of Geneva on the Pea River, but determined by the end of the first day that the habitat wasn’t suitable. It lacked old growth forest as well as flooded forest, something the ivory-bills were believed to prefer. At the end of the first day, they were wondering what to do when one of the assistants, Tyler Hicks, a 23-year-old professional birder from Kansas, suggested they turn their attention to the Choctawhatchee River south of Geneva. Hicks, now an undergraduate student in Colorado, said he recalled seeing an editorial in The Anniston Star referring to historic reporting sightings south of the city, where the Choctawhatchee and Pea rivers come together. That led him to look at satellite imagery of the area, which he determined to be more conducive to ivory-bills. Hicks, Hill and assistant Brian Rolek then moved onto the Choctawhatchee. “Within just an hour or so after we went into that area,” he said by phone from Colorado, “we heard this rapping that was really loud. I can only describe it as like someone beating a baseball bat against a tree. Soon after, Brian saw a large bird that had some interesting markings, and a little later Dr. Hill heard a double knock.” The team was interested, returned to Auburn, lined up some support, including Mennill, and started returning to the area in preparation for long-term stay in December. In the meantime, the more abstract moved into something electrifying one day in May 2005, when Hicks was sitting on a log deep in the stillness of a swamp on the Choctawhatchee. “Out of the corner of my eye I saw a large bird,” he said. “It had a strong flight, like a loon and I saw white and black markings, including white on the secondary feathers. When it flew upward, I saw dorsal white stripes, down the neck and over the back. Then it punched through the forest canopy.” The white secondary feathers are significant because they differentiate the ivory-bill from the pileated. The 23-year-old Hicks, who has been birding since he was 10, is described by Hill as one of the best birders he has ever known. He has worked professionally as a bird-watching guide and is studying to be an ornithologist. “I am as sure that I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker as I am about anything,” he said. “There is no way it could have been anything else.” Hicks says he made two sightings during his time on the river. To local people in this part of south Alabama and northwest Florida, the sightings are not entirely surprising. Stories of ivory-billed woodpeckers have floated out of the area around and south of Geneva for years, people from the region say. The swamps from just south of state line to Choctawhatchee Bay broaden out and the area is isolated. Don Marley, an aquaculturalist who owns land on the river near the state line and has been in the area for years, says while he has never seen an ivory-bill he isn’t surprised there is evidence of them in the area given the habitat. “South of Geneva, the river starts spreading out into the bottomlands, into swamp forests,” he said. “If I were to guess where they might be, I would say that they would be in that area.” ‘I have never come across anything like this in the United States’ While the team members are disappointed in the their failure to get a clear photograph of the bird, they all say Daniel Mennill’s audio recording devices and his work in an audio lab in Canada is the backbone of the research. As Mennill describes it, the team recorded 11,500 hours of audio between December 2005 and April 2006. Each day his assistant, a graduate student named Kyle Swiston, would paddle out through the cypress swamp to each of the seven remote recording stations to change the batteries and swap out the memory cards. Hill would collect the memory cards when he visited every few days and then stream the audio, sometime for up to 18 hours at a time, to Mennill. At the University of Windsor, Mennill had hired a team to “look,” not listen to the audio. They were trained to look for a particular signature sound imprint on one screen and would try to match that imprint to a collection of others on an adjoining screen, such as squirrels, gun shots, blue jay calls and other woodpeckers. That way they could exclude all those sounds. On the adjoining screen was also a sound signature of the Singer Track recording made in 1935 of the Ivory bill in Louisiana. Using this method allowed the technicians to exclude the other noises and concentrate on the ones suspected to be that of the ivory-bill. In Mennill’s opinion -- based on the body of evidence, especially the audio – “our evidence is convincing that we have found ivory bills.” Mennill, who is a specialist in avian sounds and has studied cousins of the ivory-bill in Central America says, “I have never come across anything like this in the United States. It reminds me of what I have heard in Central America.” MEET THE TEAMGeoff Hill, Scharnagel Professor in Auburn University’s Department of Biological Sciences. He co-authored today’s article on the ivory-billed woodpecker in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology.Daniel Mennill, assistant professor at the University of Windsor’s Department of Biological Sciences. Tyler Hicks, professional birder from Kansas who suggested the team turn its attention to the Choctawhatchee River south of Geneva. He now is an undergraduate student in Colorado. Kyle Swiston, graduate student at University of Windsor. He kept watch over the remote recording stations in Florida’s Choctawhatchee River. Brian Rolek, now a graduate student in ornithology at Auburn. He was an assistant to Hill and the first to spot the Ivory bill. |
