Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 13:35:21 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Denise Ryan Subject: Off Topic - Ivory-Billed Woodpecker - discouraging news MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From today's New York Times and I think NPR ran a story today as well. June 10, 2002 Faint Hope for Survival of a Woodpecker Fades By JAMES GORMAN One more faint hope for the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker has faded. A team searching swampy Louisiana bottomland in January for the regal, perhaps extinct bird heard what they thought was a distinctive double-rap on a dead tree. But researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who did a computer analysis of digital recordings of the sounds, said yesterday that the listeners actually heard distant gunshots. The ivory-bill was, or still may be, the largest North American woodpecker, 20 inches tall, with a 30-inch wingspan. It once thrived in hardwood forests of the South, but with logging of the old trees and development, the birds disappeared. For decades, however, the ivory-bill has been sighted almost as often as Elvis, and usually as reliably. But some sightings have been credible, including one in 1999 in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La. This winter, Zeiss Sports Optics paid for six people to search the wildlife management area. The Cornell Lab, a membership organization affiliated with Cornell University, also went to work, setting out 12 computerized recording units. Four members of the Zeiss team and some on the Cornell team heard the same series of loud double raps on Jan. 27 at 3:30 p.m. All thought it was a woodpecker. But no one saw the bird. The puzzle was left to a computer analysis of more than 4,000 hours of sound from the recording units. John Fitzpatrick, head of the Cornell Lab, said in an interview that the sounds were clearly gunshots. "The case is closed," Dr. Fitzpatrick said, "and nobody wanted it to be an ivory-bill more than I did." The absence of evidence does not prove an absence of birds, although Dr. Fitzgerald said no calls of an ivory-bill or its distinctive double-raps were heard recorded, so he concluded that no ivory-bills were active in that area in the time of the recording. But he is not giving up. He plans further searches in Louisiana and other areas, as does David Luneau, of the Zeiss team. "I will definitely be searching, somehow, somewhere," Mr. Luneau said. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================