Long Believed Extinct, Majestic Woodpecker Spotted in Wildlife Area
   
   By Eric Pianin
   Washington Post Staff Writer
   Thursday, December 20, 2001; Page A03
   
   For the bird-watching establishment, it was a stunning revelation.
   
   Fifty years after most ornithologists had written off the ivory-billed
   woodpecker as extinct, a sharp-eyed forestry student reported spotting
   a pair of the large, black-and-white marked birds in a southeastern
   Louisiana wildlife area in April 1999.
   
   There had been numerous hoaxes and false alarms before. But the
   forestry student had been so precise in his description that experts
   said there could be little doubt he had seen the ivory-billed
   woodpecker -- the largest and most beautiful woodpecker in North
   America that had been immortalized by naturalist painter John James
   Audubon.
   
   "This bird has a mystique," said James Van Remsen Jr., a prominent
   ornithologist at Louisiana State University. "It's part of our natural
   heritage and is symbolic of the lost wilderness of the Southeast."
   
   Now an international team of birding experts and spotters is about to
   launch the most extensive search in decades for the spectral
   woodpecker, focusing on the heavily wooded areas of southeastern
   Louisiana's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area, located less than an
   hour's drive northeast of New Orleans.
   
   Beginning Jan. 17, experts from the United States, Canada and
   Indonesia will spend 30 days combing 35,000 acres of virgin timber
   with sophisticated video and audio detection and recording equipment,
   in hopes of proving that the majestic woodpecker still exists.
   
   A bioacoustics research program at Cornell University has converted
   digital recording systems originally used for the undersea monitoring
   of whales to try to track the ivory-billed woodpecker in forests and
   swamps.
   
   "If those birds are in there we're going to find them," said Remsen,
   the curator of birds at Louisiana State University's Museum of Natural
   Science and a chief organizer of the expedition. "It would be the
   biggest bird find in many, many decades."
   
   In the world of ornithology, the rediscovery of the ivory-billed
   woodpecker would be comparable to archaeologists uncovering King Tut's
   tomb. Experts say such a finding, if fully documented, would almost
   certainly touch off a stampede of bird-watchers desperate for a
   glimpse of the storied woodpecker.
   
   "I think in the world of bird lovers there would be tremendous
   excitement this bird was rediscovered and is still in existence," said
   Thomas Bancroft, an expert on bird ecology with the Wilderness
   Society. "Very few people still alive have seen it in the United
   States."
   
   Indeed, the last documented sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker
   date to the 1930s, when ornithologist James J. Tanner chronicled his
   intimate encounters with the vanishing birds. Tanner noted that
   woodpeckers fed on the grubs that attacked recently dead trees in the
   great old-growth forests of Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, the
   Florida Panhandle and parts of East Texas. The husky birds used their
   massive bills to peel back the bark to get to the bugs and larvae.
   
   Centuries ago, tens of thousands of the beautiful woodpeckers graced
   the nation's forests.
   
   It was the destruction and clear-cutting of many of those old-growth
   forests that led to the decline and virtual disappearance of the
   ivory-billed woodpecker.
   
   The bird was huge and beautiful: It averaged 20 inches in height and
   had a wingspan of 31 to 33 inches. Its markings were bold patterns of
   black and white, and it had an ivory-white bill that measured three
   inches from base to tip. The male was especially distinctive because
   of its brilliant, blood-red crest. Only the imperial woodpecker of
   Mexico was larger than the ivory-billed woodpecker, but that bird also
   has vanished.
   
   Ornithologists had all but given up on the ivory-billed woodpecker
   until David Kulivan, a 21-year-old forestry student at LSU, said he
   came across two of them -- a male and female -- while he was turkey
   hunting in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area.
   
   "I knew as soon as I saw them it was something I had never seen
   before," Kulivan told a newspaper reporter when the story broke some
   months after his April 1999 sighting.
   
   Kulivan was an experienced bird-watcher, according to Remsen, and knew
   the difference between an ivory-billed woodpecker and a pileated
   woodpecker, a common bird that bears a strong resemblance to the
   ivory-billed woodpecker.
   
   "I'm a born skeptic," Remsen said. "But after we grilled Kulivan, we
   decided to go for it."
   
   With financial backing from Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, a team of five
   bird experts and a few other searchers will spend a month scouring the
   wildlife management area for the ivory-billed woodpeckers.
   
   The team includes Richard L. Knight, a veteran birder and author from
   Tennessee; Martjan Lammertink of Indonesia, who spent 21 months
   searching for the ivory-billed woodpecker and imperial woodpecker in
   Cuba and Mexico; David Luneau, a University of Arkansas professor of
   electronics and computers; Peter McBride, an American habitat
   biologist; and Alan Wormington of Canada, one of the the most
   experienced birders in North America.
   
                     © 2001 The Washington Post Company