Dr. Navtej Kohli Blog

Navtej Kohli personal blog writes on the passion of Navtej Kohli for Ornithology. The search for the Woodpecker continues in America….. Away down in the swampy bottomlands of Dixie in Arkansas, the most intensive search ever for a bird is gearing up for a make-or-break season. Big reputations are riding on the controversial quest for the ivory-billed woodpecker, the most magnificent and most elusive of America’s tree-knockers.

Here in the vast White River National Wildlife Refuge, naturalists across the globe are trying to confirm the most prolonged debate over the sightings of a bird written off as extinct until four years ago.

The camouflage-clad scientists, venturing into what one described as the “most woodpeckeriest” woods to be found from South Carolina to East Texas, have an array of high-tech tools, from GPS coordinate monitors to satellite imagery. Automatic cameras catch digital images, their infrared flash strobes blinking near rotted trees and other likely roosting sites. Sensitive audio recorders strain “ivory-billed-like” sound from the constant clamor of other birds.

This month, for the first time, US Fish and Wildlife Service helicopters were enlisted in the chase, flying low-level “flush” missions meant to spook birds into breaking from the treetops. The idea is that airborne scientists might catch a glimpse of an ivory-billed and supply coordinates to help ground teams hone searches ongoing across hundreds of thousands of wilderness acres.

The last ivory-billed sighting claimed by a bird scientist occurred on Valentine’s Day 2005, in Arkansas, when a researcher from Cornell’s famed Laboratory of Ornithology, Casey Taylor, spied what she is convinced was one of the huge woodpeckers being harried by a mob of crows.

But skeptics scoff at that sighting almost as loudly as they jeer at a fuzzy 2004 videotape purporting to show an ivory-billed. Such critics say the woodpecker has almost certainly been extinct since the 1940s and that the search is a colossal waste of money and scientific energy. They maintain ivory-billed scientists, however expert, are simply fooled by glimpses of similar-looking - but commonplace - pileated woodpeckers.

The rancorous dispute has shaken the usually-collegial bird community, with mud-slinging between prominent biologists. Doubters last year used a professional journal to accuse the ivory-billed scientists of practicing “faith-based ornithology.”

Meanwhile, in the real muck of the bottomlands, the search continues.