IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER (CAMPEPHILUS PRINCIPALIS): HOPE, AND THE INTERFACES OF SCIENCE, CONSERVATION, AND POLITICS

IN 1986, THE U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service appointed an Advisory Committee to evaluate the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a species that had been on U.S. endangered species lists since their inception. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided a grant of $60,000, and I used a sabbatical to conduct the search. The BWCP recruited a paid and volunteer search team comprising professional colleagues, friends, relatives, and students, and the team logged more than 22,000 hours searching for the bird between February 2004 and the announcement in April 2005. Evidence put forth to support the conclusion that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker persists in Arkansas included (1) a de-interlaced, zoomedin, and cropped portion of a poor-quality four second video captured fortuitously on 25 April 2004 by David Luneau, an engineering professor from Arkansas, of a bird as it flew from behind a tree and away from the camera into the woods along Bayou de View on Cache River NWR, Monroe County; (2) seven brief sightings, none closer or of longer duration than the video, made between 11 February 2004 and 15 February 2005; (3) several additional sightings that were considered inadequate as scientific evidence; and (4) acoustic signals believed to be possible Ivory-billed Woodpecker vocalizations and double raps recorded by autonomous recording units (ARUs) placed around the White River NWR -130 km (-80 miles) to the south (Charif et al. 2005, Fitzpatrick et al. 2005a, Rosenberg et al. 2005).