Nature 437, 188-190 (8 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/437188a
Ornithology: A wing and a prayer
Rex Dalton
Sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird believed extinct for 50 years, have fired the public's imagination. But is it really alive? Rex Dalton joins the team trying to save this elusive bird.
The Big Woods in Arkansas is not a good place to be on a hot summer day. The swampy forest is thick with mud, poison ivy and snakes. Yet early last month, a dozen scientists slogged their way through these bottomlands towards a mesh tent abuzz with insects — the heart of an unusual US environmental project.
The group's goal is to save the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a magnificent bird thought to have died off at least 50 years ago as its forest habitat was chopped down. In April, a team led by ornithologists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stunned the birding world by saying they had evidence that the woodpecker still lived in the Big Woods (J. W. Fitzpatrick et al. Science 308, 1460−1462; 2005). Now more scientists are braving the wilderness as part of a federally sanctioned 'recovery team', charged with plotting a course to produce a healthy population of the birds.
Near the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the ivory-billed was reportedly rediscovered in February 2004, the team has cut the trunks of trees to create deadwood. The deadwood, in turn, should become home to insect larvae, which are the woodpecker's favourite food. If the elusive ivory-billed shows up to snack, the scientists can use the insects in the tent to identify the larvae and better understand the bird's eating habits.
To some, the team's mission is a conservationist's dream, a chance to bring back an iconic bird from the brink of extinction. To others, it is a near-futile attempt — possibly at the expense of other worthwhile projects — to save a species that may no longer grace these woods. The problem is that no one can prove whether the woodpecker still exists.
Forest hunch
"The bird is here," Martjan Lammertink insists in the steamy Arkansas bottomlands. Lammertink, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, has studied rare woodpeckers from Mexico to Cuba to Borneo. He moved to the nearby town of Brinkley so that he could devote himself to pursuing the 'Lord God bird' — named after what people would exclaim when they saw its gleaming bill, ferocious red crest, and body nearly half a metre long.
Yet not all ornithologists are as convinced as Lammertink. Several, including Jerome Jackson of Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, have repeatedly questioned the Cornell team's evidence for the bird's existence. Neither the four-second video purporting to show an ivory-billed, nor the sound recordings released last month at a bird meeting in California, satisfy this group of sceptics. Ivory-billed searchers, Jackson says, "are shooting in the dark".
The quest for the ivory-billed is steeped in politics as well as science. The Bush administration, smarting from criticism over its environmental policies, hailed the purported rediscovery as a rare piece of good news. Cornell team leader, John Fitzpatrick, had hoped that his occasional birding companion, First Lady Laura Bush, would make the announcement. But news leaks soon turned into a flood, and the secretaries of the interior and agriculture held the press conference instead — on 28 April, the day after the manuscript on the find had been accepted by Science.
Now, the federal government is providing an extra $10 million to save the woodpecker's habitat, money redirected from other conservation projects even as congressional Republicans consider cutting back on the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Researchers on the ivory-billed's recovery team face a formidable challenge - figuring out how to save a bird that may already be extinct. Even if it still lives, there may be only a handful of individuals left, not enough to save the species as a whole.
US scientists have brought other birds back from the verge of extinction, including the whooping crane (Grus americana) and the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus). But never before has the species in question been almost completely invisible. The search for the ivory-billed, one scientist says, is like looking for "a moving needle in one hell of a haystack".
Search party
Still, the hunt goes on, and last month the recovery team met for the first time in Little Rock to explore possible research fronts. Some ornithologists are developing a 'life-table model' to try to determine how many of the birds could have survived, factoring in estimated lifespan and habitat. The best guess is about 15 pairs.
Other scientists are examining the chisel-like mark of the ivory-billed's beak to see if it can be discerned from that of other woodpeckers. And major efforts are under way to increase the habitat for the bird's larvae hunt — the woodpecker can roam 20 kilometres a day in search of dying trees from which to strip bark.
Such studies are rarely controversial, but the $10-million habitat-preservation plan has raised some eyebrows. At the same time that biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) saw their budgets slashed, the ivory-billed project got a cash infusion. Meanwhile, successful programmes to recover other endangered species were scaled back.
One such example is the Kirtland's warbler (Dendroica kirtlandii), a small bird that breeds in Michigan and winters in the Bahamas. More than 30 years ago, the warbler population included some 160 singing males. Today, after years of trapping brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) that parasitically use the warblers' nests, the population boasts a record number of more than 1,400 singing males. But this spring, cowbird trapping in Michigan was drastically cut back; only about 1,100 cowbirds were snared compared with about 4,000 the previous year.
Federal biologists cannot prove that the warbler programme is suffering because of the ivory-billed woodpecker, but many find the timing curious. "It doesn't make any sense to put one species at risk to save another," says Eric Carey, parks director at the Bahamas National Trust in Nassau, who studies the warbler's winter habitat.
FWS biologist Jon Andrew, who manages federal refuges in the southeastern United States, argues that such diversions are justified given the ivory-billed's precarious situation. "There was enough evidence that we ought to be acting as if the bird was there," he says. "When you make decisions on spending money, there are winners and losers."
To the public at least, the ivory-billed woodpecker is clearly a winner. The rediscovery announcement triggered a rush of national goodwill. Headlines trumpeted the bird that seemed to have made it against all odds. Arkansas experienced a miniature tourist boom as birders flocked to the refuge.
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I don't know how many of you outside of the States have heard about the rediscovery of Ivory-billed Woodpecker. But most of you who live in the country should know a bit about the story if you watch the news on TV or read the newspaper.
What gets me is that why on earth is Bush cutting funds from other wildlife projects to draw money into this one, when nothing is clear about the existance of the bird?! Just simply based on a blurry video clip and some 'distinct' wood pecking sound recorded in the wild? If he's that easily convienced, why didn't he do something more sensible for cases like Katrina when there are warnings everywhere.
This is one of the many silly decisions he had made in spending our money. What do you think of him and Laura will get outta the chunk of money he put into this woodpecker project? A pair of woodpeckers in their garden?
