Some Doubt Return of Lost Woodpecker

A new analysis of fuzzy video taken in the swamps of Arkansas casts doubt on the ballyhooed comeback of the ivory-billed woodpecker, four bird experts wrote in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“Although we support efforts to find and protect ivory-billed woodpeckers, the video evidence does not demonstrate that the species persists in the United States,” said the experts, who included David Allen Sibley, artist and author of bird guides.

“None of the features described as diagnostic of the ivory-billed woodpecker eliminate a normal pileated woodpecker,” they wrote, in response to a Science article last year on the return of the bird, whose last official sighting was in 1944.

Ivory-billed woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers are about the size of crows. But scientists thought the video showed the white dorsal patches that characterize the ivory-billed bird.

Pileated woodpeckers are common over much of the U.S., whereas ivory-billed woodpeckers had been thought extinct for decades.

A group of experts who say the bird is back -- including David Luneau, who made the four-second video -- responded in a commentary in Science.

“Claims that the bird in the Luneau video is a normal pileated woodpecker are based on misrepresentations of a pileated’s underwing pattern, interpretation of video artifacts as plumage pattern, and inaccurate models of takeoff and flight behavior,” this team wrote.

Experts and volunteers are engaged in an intensive search for more signs of the ivory-bill in the swampy Big Woods section of eastern Arkansas.

Definitive proof might include the discovery of a roost tree, where scientists could focus cameras in hopes of a bird sighting. A fragment of eggshell or feathers from an ivory-billed woodpecker might also help put questions to rest.