Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 03:56:44 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Paul Woodward Subject: Fw: CAVNET: Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Not a Maryland bird but thought this might be of interest. Paul Woodward Fairfax City, VA grackling@worldnet.att.net ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric L. Walters To: Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 2:36 PM Subject: CAVNET: Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting? I thought this recent article (see below) might be of interest to CAVNET'ers. I have confirmed the story with David Kulivan (the graduate student who observed the two alleged Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Campephilu= s principalis). Here's what David Kulivan wrote me in an email today (Feb. 2, 2000): "The article you read in the Clarion-Ledger is accurate. It basically covered the nuts and bolts of the sighting. There were some other elemen= ts of my sighting that were not covered in the article. Such as their call, discernible coloration (white on wings visible at rest, etc.) and a few other details. If I can be of any further assistance, please feel free t= o contact me. Take care, David Kulivan Dkulivan@aol.com " Below is the article that was published in the Clarion-Ledger (http://www.clarionledger.com/news/0001/30/30woodpecker.html) Eric Walters CAVNET MODERATOR ****************************************** Glimpse of ivory stirs up woods: Biologists trying to confirm sighting of woodpecker By Bruce Reid Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer January 30, 2000 The ghost of the Southern swamps has appeared again. Like all ghosts, its existence can neither be confirmed nor denied - at least not yet. But wha= t college student David Kulivan saw while turkey hunting in the swampy wild= s along the lower Pearl River was no ordinary vision. As best he can tell, = he saw male and female ivory-billed woodpeckers, birds thought by many scientists to have disappeared from North America decades ago as the last big tracts of old-growth hardwoods were cut. "I knew as soon as I saw them it was something I had never seen before," Kulivan said last week, recalling the experience last April southwest of Picayune, in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area of St. Tammany Parish, La. Now, federal biologists are considering whether to conduct detailed field studies to see if Kulivan really saw the crow-sized king o= f the woodpeckers, with its gleaming yellow eyes and ivory-colored, jackhammer of a bill. "We're not ready to discount this observation," said Debbie Fuller, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Fuller said timber cutting in the management area has been curtailed for now. If ivory-bills exist there, they've "got as much protection as they'= re going to get right now." The ivory-bill has not been declared extinct; it is still on the federal list of endangered species. There already have been a few forays by scientists and bird experts to th= e area of the sighting, including one Jan. 21, when about a dozen observers covered 6,000 acres with no success. The last documented U.S. nesting record for the species was in the 1940s = in an old-growth forest, now logged, just west of Vicksburg. The land now is included in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge near Tallulah, La. Former Mississippi State University professor Jerry Jackson is among thos= e who have held out hope that a few of the woodpeckers have survived. Wispy appearances of single ivory-bills or reports of their calls, never confirmed, have haunted Jackson and other ornithologists for years. Jackson, now at Florida Gulf Coast University, is writing a book on ivory-bills. In 1987, he and a graduate student reported that a bird responded in kind to a recording of an ivory-bill call for 18 minutes jus= t north of Vicksburg. To J.V. Remsen, curator of birds at the Louisiana Museum of Natural Science, Kulivan's report of ivory-bills is the most credible he's receiv= ed in 22 years on the job. "He didn't tell anybody for a while, because he didn't think anybody would believe him," Remsen said of Kulivan, a Louisiana State University graduate student in wildlife studies. "If the kid did make this up, he is a fantastic fabricator." Remsen said February and March would be prime time to search for ivory-bills, because it's less buggy and the trees are bare. The birds, i= f they are there, also would be more vocal as breeding season approached. "If there's anything wrong with this sighting, it was too good," said Ste= ve Shively, a zoologist with the Louisiana Natural Heritage program who is helping organize searches for the birds. Still, he said he and others believe they have an obligation to "investigate this to the extent appropriate." Mark Woodry, curator of ornithology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, said he's intrigued by Kulivan's report and wants to monitor the activities of his counterparts just across the state border. For now, Woodry said, no expeditions are planned to search for ivory-bill= s in Mississippi. Most of the dense river forests left in the lower Pearl River region are in Louisiana. Until now, Kulivan's report has been kept mostly quiet. Soon, however, word of the report will spread further. Writing teacher Christopher Cokinos of Kansas State University chronicles it in his new book, due out in March, on the demise of U.S. birds such as ivory-bills, Carolina parakeets and passenger pigeons. The book, called Hope is the Thing with Feathers, A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, is to be released around the 100th anniversary of the shooting of the last wild passenger pigeon, a bird that darkened the skies in Mississippi and elsewhere until wiped out by market hunters. Cokinos said last week he hopes to visit the lower Pearl region. He said he'd like to think Kulivan could have seen ivory-bills. Cokinos still receives reports of ivory-bill sightings from Cuba, where Jackson and others found the birds in the 1980s. By 1995, many scientists thought the birds were extinct there, too. If anything, Cokinos said, "I hope talking about ivory-bills will help us make a transition to talking about other species that are having difficulty." For his part, Kulivan is glad his report was not dismissed. Ivory-bills c= an easily be confused with slightly smaller pileated woodpeckers, which are surviving fairly well in the remaining hardwood forests and wood lots. Kulivan said he's in the woods often enough to know what pileated woodpeckers look like. "I know for a fact that it wasn't that." The birds were close, 10 yards at one point, before they flew behind him after 10 minutes, calling as they went. At least one of them was hammerin= g its bill fiercely, "knocking the bark off of the trees." For now, biologists like Shively can only imagine the experience of seein= g an ivory-bill, in all its "manic glory," as Cokinos writes in his book. "It would be like seeing a ghost," Shively said. "It would make your hair stand on end." Copyright =A9 2000, The Clarion-Ledger. ============================================================= CAVNET is a global forum to facilitate scientific discussions concerning cavity-nesting birds via email. Send any messages you wish to have posted on CAVNET to cavnet@uvvm.uvic.ca. Be sure to include your name, address, and affiliation at the bottom of any posting. For list administration needs or any other questions about CAVNET, please contact the list moderator (Eric L. Walters) at ewalters@bio.fsu.edu. Visit CAVNET's web page at http://www.bio.fsu.edu/~jameslab ============================================================= ========================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ========================================================================= ===========================================================================