Fitzpatrick

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- The director of Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology, John Fitzpatrick, has presented new evidence that a grainy and blurry piece of videotape shows the ivory-billed woodpecker: His analysis indicates proof in the elusive bird's wing beats.

Presenting a plenary lecture at the American Ornithologists' Union Meeting at the University of California-Santa Barbara Aug. 25, Fitzpatrick said a new analysis of the video shows 11 wing beats of a retreating black-and-white-winged bird, consistent with the wing beats of an ivory-billed woodpecker and faster than the flight of the pileated woodpecker, commonly mistaken for the ivory-bill.

While skeptical ornithologists recently claimed that the video images, captured in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas in 2004, likely show the smaller but similarly patterned pileated woodpecker, new studies indicate that the pileated woodpecker beats its wings between 7 to 7.5 times per second in a slow rowing motion.

By comparison, the bird in the video flies at a rate of 8.7 beats per second in a direct duck-like flight consistent with historical accounts of ivory-bills. Fitzpatrick played an April 1935 audio recording, made by the Lab of Ornithology's founder Arthur Allen, of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Singer Tract in Louisiana flying away from its nest hole. The flapping wings are clearly audible. Using a spectogram showing audio patterns over time on a graph, Fitzpatrick showed that the 1935 ivory-bill had flapped its wings at 8.6 beats per second.

"My personal view is that I am convinced there are ivory-bills out there, one or more," Fitzpatrick said. "Absolutely convinced."

The blurry out-of-focus video of the ivory-bill, which had long been thought to be extinct, was taken accidentally by University of Arkansas associate professor David Luneau, who had his camera on auto-focus in his canoe while searching for the bird. The video images were the centerpiece of an April 28, 2005, online Science Express article, and was also analyzed in the June 3, 2005, issue of Science.

Krishna Ramanujan/Cornell News Service

Cornell Lab of Ornithology research biologist Russ Charif, right, one of several Cornell researchers speaking at the American Ornithologist's Union meeting at the University of California-Santa Barbara, describes the discovery to New York Times reporter James Gorman. Copyright © Cornell University

During his lecture, Fitzpatrick played the video in its entirety for the first time publicly. He played it repeatedly at normal speed, and slowed it down at various rates and with close-ups.

Fitzpatrick also attempted to measure the bird's wingspan based on the video flight sequence. Focusing on a frame of the third flap out of 11, where the white part of the wing is clearly visible, and extrapolating the black wingtip feathers based on stuffed specimens and other sources, he measured the wingspan at 70 centimeters (27.5 inches).

The 70-centimeter measurement was right at the cutoff point for both ivory-bill and pileated woodpeckers' wingspans, on the high end for a pileated, and within the lower range for an ivory-bill. Still, pileated woodpeckers found in Arkansas belong to a smaller subspecies, with average wingspans closer to 60 to 65 centimeters (23.6-25.6 inches).

Conservation was a prominent theme of Fitzpatrick's talk. He said the central message to take away from this rediscovery should be the importance of preserving land and restoring wild areas. He pointed to passenger pigeons whose flocks "once blackened skies," only to be decimated by human destruction of habitat.

He added it was unlikely that a subspecies of ivory-bills in Cuba still survive based on the tiny portion of Cuban habitat remaining, equal to only a fraction of the half-million acres in the Arkansas Big Woods.

In the future, ivory-billed woodpeckers should be used as a symbol to set priorities for returning Southern ecosystems to their past glory, he stressed.

The ivory-billed woodpecker requires large forests with dying trees, he explained. The bird evolved in conjunction with large-scale disturbances like floods, winds, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and invasions of beetles and beavers, all of which kill trees and in turn provide a habitat for the ivory-bill's diet of large beetle larvae. At the same time, younger forests have lower densities of dying trees than older forests.

"We can save these [older] forests, and we can do it with the great badge of a bird if things go right," Said Fitzpatrick.