Sightings spur rush to aid ‘extinct’ woodpecker

WASHINGTON - The ivory-billed woodpecker, long feared extinct, has been rediscovered in a remote part of Arkansas some 60 years after the last confirmed U.S. sighting, bird experts said Thursday. In response, the federal government immediately announced a plan to save the bird.

"Today we are commiting to a multiagency, multimillion-dollar, multiyear program to provide hope for this bird's continued survival," Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced at a news conference.

She said this was the first time in her memory that an American species considered to be extinct had been rediscovered. "Second chances to save wildlife thought to be extinct are extremely rare," she said.

The Interior and Agriculture departments would set aside $10 million this year for the "Corridor of Hope" conservation plan, supplementing private funding, Norton said. The "Corridor of Hope" refers to the Big Woods of Arkansas, an area about 120 miles (192 kilometers) long and up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) wide in eastern Arkansas where the bird was sighted.

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said landowners in the area could become eligible for $13.5 million in rental payments over the next 15 years to maintain the trees that ivory-billed woodpeckers use as their habitat.

Rush report
The series of sightings, which began more than a year ago, were reported in research published online Thursday by the journal Science on a rush basis. Ornithologist John Fitzpatrick of Cornell University, one of the researchers behind the Science paper, said that several independent sightings of the bird had been made in recent years, but that the latest sightings were the first confirmed by video and audio documentation.

For birdwatchers, "nothing could have been more hoped for than this holy grail," Fitzpatrick told reporters Thursday.

Frank Gill, senior ornithologist at the Audubon Society, said the discovery “is kind of like finding Elvis.”

“There have been lots and lots of reports and many of them have been off but others have been possible,” Gill added. “But this time we got it.”

Fitzpatrick reported that a video clip, though blurry, also shows the bird and key features, including the size and markings.

“The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives,” Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, said in a statement.

'Lord God bird'
Fitzpatrick identified the bird by magnifying and analyzing individual frames of the video clip.

A large, dramatic-looking bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker was known to be shy and to prefer the deep woods of the U.S. Southeast. It was sometimes nicknamed the “Lord God bird,” Fitzpatrick told reporters in a telephone briefing.

“It is such a striking bird. When people would see it they would say, 'Lord God, what a woodpecker.’ That’s where it came from,” he said.

It's not certain if more than one bird has been sighted, but Gill believes that's the case. “There has got to be a pretty serious lineage,” Gill said. “It’s got to be more than a few.”

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