River of Biodiversity

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Alabama, Past, Present and Future 

Draft 6/30/23, update Draft 2/26/25

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker's 21st century existence has been proven with thousands of pages of field data, sighting reports and supporting audio and video frames. Lingering however is the popular, erroneous dogma of its long-ago extinction supported by a refusal to accept its innate wariness and low detection rate. The Ivory-billed has been and is misunderstood by various bird record committees and understaffed, non-game department personnel. The commonsense bias, based on "none of us have seen the bird" rejects facts, several published papers, numerous field reports and the impacts of microevolution on this specie's modern behavior.

This context has led to many state bird record committees and state resource departments maintaining their dispositive, formal extirpation or extinction designation for the species. In light of what we have learned about Ivory-bills, these "conclusive" determinations were not based on science but on a commonsense bias and preserved today by face-saving apathy. 

How to judge the proportionality of culpability for the diminution of the bird's numbers is as difficult to agree upon as who is responsible for prolonging the falsehood that Ivory-bills were not seen after 1944 and into the 21st century.  

Here is an examination of Alabama, which would be similar for other SE US states, on how this bias and stagnant situation can be settled with field data. Utilizing proper, accepted field survey techniques would benefit the bird, birders, science and conservation. 

        

The Past  The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was a relatively common resident of forested areas in most or all of Alabama several centuries ago. It became restricted to wetland forests in south Alabama as the 19th century progressed. Some unconfirmed reports over the decades infer the Ivory-billed may have lingered in a few central and northern areas of the state into the 20th century.  Tanner writes, “By 1885 the birds had disappeared from North Carolina and northern South Carolina and from all the region west of the Mississippi Delta excepting the very southeastern part of Texas. By 1900 they were gone from almost all of Alabama and Mississippi.”

After the devastating Civil War, logging and poverty were extensive, and many local Ivory-billed populations were likely displaced and hunted to collapse.  

Description	Map of the range of the Ivory-billed woodpecker, pre 1860 (solid black line), 1891 (hashed area)
Date	April 1891
Source	The Auk, Volume 8, No. 2
Author	Edwin M. Hasbrouck

The last confirmed bird via specimen in Alabama was shot in the Conecuh River swamps north of Troy in 1907. There were subsequent Alabama sightings without an associated specimen. In the Florida panhandle, a small population was thought to persist post 2005 and perhaps into the 2020s in the Florida panhandle, near SE Alabama.
 

Conecuh River swamps just north of Troy, Alabama (red, upper middle of this map), was where the last AL Ivory-billed specimen was shot in 1907. This area is 200 miles due N of the Choctawhatchee River Water Man. Area in FL.

Today the forested riparian areas around Troy, Alabama are fragmented, with a narrow corridor of trees along wetland areas. Although these sinuous corridors have little chance of supporting breeding Ivory-bills now, they have in the past provided an acceptable, but now precarious greenway, connecting larger forest tracts of the SE USA.

But does Alabama have similar gaps in our understanding than almost everyone in the United States and Louisiana had in 1932? That year the colorful and well educated Mason Spencer insisted they were alive in the state and he could prove it. Although the last documented sighting of the species in Louisiana had been in 1899, he received a hunting permit and legally brought in an Ivory-billed he had just shot. 

Since several or more, Ivory-bills persisted into the 21st century, breeding must have occurred undetected for several decades in a heterogenous pattern. The remnant ribbons of habitat, connecting larger forest blocks, evidently allowed some periodic gene flow for the few remaining metapopulations or isolated family groups of Ivory-bills; this maintained at least some viability.  

The historical literature on the Ivory-billed in Alabama is limited. The classic Birds of Alabama by Arthur H. Howell, USDA, issued by the Department of Game and Fisheries of Alabama in 1928 is highlighted here. The work contains an introduction to the state's early history of field ornithology with a few pages on the Ivory-billed.   

Birds of Alabama, select pages

 

 

Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1928 Howell:

 

Small part of the NBP analysis of the 2008 flyunder IBWO video (Collins, 2008 video, Virrazzi, 2022 paper and derivative videos)  

In 1942, the National Audubon Society issued its  Research Report No. 1, by James Tanner "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker". There are two pertinent mentions of Alabama IB locations; site fidelity should never be underestimated even if the areas were not continuously forested. Aerials should be viewed by experienced Ivory-billed researchers and subsequent visits arranged if warranted.

From Research Report No. 1, "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker":

   

In 1838, English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse lived and taught school for eight months in the community of Pleasant Hill, about 18 miles south of Selma in Dallas County. Two decades later, when he had become a prominent figure in British science circles, Gosse published "Letters from Alabama, Chiefly Relating to Natural History."

Gosse wrote of his encounters with the ivory-billed in the woods of Dallas County. Tanner notes the event in the Alabama Region of his report. The pair of birds he had come across, he wrote, were "rapping some tall dead pines, in a dense part of the forest, which rang with their loud notes."

In describing the bird's call and plumage, Gosse clearly knew the difference between the ivory-billed and the pileated woodpecker (The Huntsville Times, 2006; al.com, 2006).

USFWS - Recovery Plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

In 2010, as a byproduct of the IBWO "rediscovery" in Arkansas 2004, the USFWS completed a Recovery Plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

 
This is an important reference since it was compiled by many people from their accumulated knowledge, sources, data and files.

Here are the pertinent Alabama parts of the Plan:

In part due to the Big Thicket reports, the Southwest Region of the Service during the late 1980s initiated range-wide status review for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and contracted Jackson (2004) to conduct the work. Jackson’s report provides a thorough review of all past reports and an assessment of whether the Ivory-billed Woodpecker could still persist in the Southeastern U.S. Jackson’s findings were inconclusive as he found no hard evidence to confirm the species’ existence but discussed in some detail his own possible encounters with the species. Jackson provides two accounts of his experiences, one along the Noxubee River in Alabama just across the Mississippi state line and the other in Mississippi along the Yazoo River confluence with the Mississippi River. For the Noxubee River account he glimpsed what he thought could have been an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 1973, but no further evidence has emerged since the 1970s in Alabama. For the Yazoo River account, Jackson and his graduate student, Mr. Malcolm Hodges (who now works for The Nature Conservancy in Georgia), reported hearing a bird in 1987 that in their view closely matched the Cornell tape recording of the species. The bird in question apparently was responding to their playing of the Cornell tape, but never came in close enough for a visual contact, and Jackson and Hodges had no capability to record what they heard. In sum, there have been numerous reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers since the 1940s, and Jackson’s plea for the public to provide information during his status review resulted in hundreds of letters and phone calls to Service biologists. Most of these reports again were dismissed easily as misidentified Pileated Woodpeckers and in some cases Red-headed Woodpeckers. Still, as suggested above, tantalizing reports including photographs, tape recordings, and a feather suggest that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers could have persisted in very low numbers in highly isolated locations at least till the late 1980s. Nevertheless, near the end of the 20th Century there was absolutely no undisputed evidence acceptable to the scientific community to back up any claim that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers persisted past the 1940s. Thus, after more than a decade of relative silence, it came as a great surprise to many in the conservation community that an apparently solid report of a pair of birds had been observed in the late 1990s, this time along the Pearl River on the Louisiana side. Mr. David Kulivan, a wildlife student at Louisiana State University, waited a couple of weeks after his wild turkey hunting adventure during the spring of 1999 at the Pearl River WMA, but he finally contacted Van Remsen at the Museum of Natural History, Louisiana State University to discuss what he had observed. He claimed to have observed two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, one adult male and one adult female, foraging together for about 10 minutes. Although he had a camera with him, he claimed he was too much focused on observing the birds to move an inch from his hunting position. After several hours of interviews, Remsen concluded that the details in Kulivan’s report were the most solid evidence he had heard in 22 years of keeping track of information to suggest Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are still extant (Williams 2001, Gallagher 2005).

  Appendix E.

Alabama (#’s where indicated are cross-referenced to Figure 6 in Tanner), subregions: (A) FL Panhandle, FL-AL, (B) Lower Tombigbee-Alabama-Mobile rivers, AL, (C) Upper Tombigbee River, AL-MS, (D) Pascagoula River and coastal Mississippi, MS, (E) Pearl River, MS-LA

1850-1859 (B-1) Near the Alabama River and Selma, Dallas County, AL; around 1850 (#6; two specimens now unaccounted for, but two specimens in Hahn dated “abt. 1850” may refer to these at the collection in Kessel, Germany) 

1860-1869 (B-2) Tombigbee River, Marengo County, AL (Tanner mistakenly listed MS); 1865 (#5; specimen now unaccounted for) 

1870-1879 None 

1880-1889 (A-6*) Blackwater River, FL (two specs.); March 1883 (Hahn; Tanner did mention this report but did not know location nor the
date) (B-3) Cypress Slough, 10 miles west of Greensboro, Hale County, AL; 1886 (#4; specimen now unaccounted for) (B-4) Wilcox County, AL;
1889 (#7) (C-1) Monroe County, MS; 1885 (#1) (C-2) Crump Springs, Lamar County, Buttahatchie River, AL; 1886 (#2) (C-3) Clay County, MS; 1885
(#3) (E-1) Near Bay St. Louis, MS; 1885 (#9) 1890-1899 (D-1*) Mississippi City, Harrision County, MS (two specs.); March 1893 (#10; Hahn 1963 also lists a specimen taken in April 1893 included in total
here) 

1900-1909 (A-1) Conecuh Swamps, north of Troy, Pike County AL; 1907 (#8; specimen now unaccounted for) (D-2) Big Black River, MS (one pair reported by M. Vaiden); 1908 (Jackson 2004, USFWS 2007)

 1910-1919 None 

1920-1929( D-3) Pascagoula Swamp, Jackson County; December 1921 (#11) 

1930-1939 (A-2) Escambia River, FL; 1936 (Weston 1965, Stevenson and Anderson 1994) 1940-1949 (A-3) Perdido River, FL; 1945 (Weston 1965, Stevenson and Anderson 1994)

 1950-1959 (D-4) About 30 miles north of Meridian, MS (B. Chauncey); 1953 (Moore 1954, Jackson 2004) (E-2) East side of Pearl River, adjacent to lock #1, St. Tammany Parish, LA, Hancock County, MS (one male foraging on sweet gum, by J. Merritt); October 1955 (USFWS 2007) 

1960-1969 (A-4) Eglin Air Force Base near Yellow River, FL (two birds seen Boiling Creek; B. Brown and J. Sanders reported to Dennis); August 1966 (Jackson 2004) (D-5) Leaf River swamp (1 mile north of US Hwy 98), Perry County, MS (2 seen briefly in “big gum” trees); December 1960 (USFWS 2007)

 1970-1979 (C-4) Noxubee River, near junction with Tombigbee River, Sumter County , AL (possible f lyby by J. Jackson); March 1973 (Jackson 2004) (D-6) Near where Black Creek joins Pascagoula River, Jackson County, MS (one possible heard “kenting”
but never seen by R. Sauey and C. Luthin); January 1978 (Jackson 2004)

1980-1989 (D-3) West side of Pascagoula River, north of Vancleave, Jackson County, MS (two birds in a pine by M. Morris); February 1982 (Jackson 2004) (E-2) Pearl River, St. Tammany Parish, LA (a male observed one year, a female the following year, both by N.
Higginbotham); 1986, 1987 (Steinberg 2008) 

1990-1999 (E-2) Pearl River, St. Tammany Parish, LA (a pair reported seen for 10 minutes by D. Kulivan while turkey hunting; extensive followup searches in subsequent years unsuccessful); April 1999 (Jackson 2004) 

2000 -2009 (A-5) Choctawhatchee River, FL (multiple visual and auditory encounters by many observers, including many recordings of putative kents and double-knocks and a very poor video); 2005-2007 (Hill et al. 2006, Hill 2007) (E-2) Pearl River WMA – Stennis Space Center, St. Tammany Parish, LA, Hancock County, MS (multiple sightings, several very poor but at least one suggestive video in 2006 of a large woodpecker, possibly lacking red in the crest; a more recent video of a woodpecker in flight in 2009 was determined to be a Red-headed woodpecker, a 2008 video is still undergoing review by M.
Collins and others); 2000, 2005-2009 (USFWS 2007; Collins 2005-2009

Fill in Alabama info here here here her 

The Present  There has not been any modern evidence presented for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker's recent existence in Alabama to my knowledge.  The species has been called extirpated for decades without any formal field work completed. 

Bob Harrison of Alabama, a long-time searcher for Ivory-bills, claims ~ 9 Ivory-billed encounters but some or all of these encounters may have been in Arkansas or other states. In 2006 Harrison, a wildlife photographer and then an Oakwood College professor credited as one of the co-discoverers of the ivory-billed in Arkansas, thought there was still a chance the bird could be in Alabama (The Huntsville Times, 2006; al.com, 2006).

In the January-February issue of Birdwatcher's Digest, 2006, Harrison said he thought Ivory-billeds might be hanging on in other Southern swamps. In Alabama, he mentioned the
Tensaw Delta north of Mobile Bay and the Pea River as possible areas to search.

Over the decades, the compilers of official state bird checklists have understandably moved the Ivory-billed into the extirpated or extinct category. The keepers invariably rely on the lack of reports, or credible reports, or dismiss credible reports as mistakes over the decades, to feel comfortable with this designation. Is this conclusion based on science, such as any formal point surveys, or organized surveys, for example? No.

It relies on common sense which is a bias that occasionally leads to mistaken and premature conclusions; there are innumerable examples of errors in varied disciplines when relying only on strong feelings.  

The Ivory-billed has an extremely low detection rate when using most informal birding techniques. It's wary and observant per historical and modern reports. Searches for Ivory-bills require careful planning, staffing and execution. 

Top areas to search for Ivory-bills in Alabama according to NBP's field data and ranking model: see NBP files

In 2023 Alabama state biologists were contacted to see how they determined the Ivory-billed was extirpated per the Alabama state checklist. It was confirmed there had been no formal or scientifically based survey performed in Alabama for Ivory-bills. Therefore, it is not known if there are any Ivory-bills in the state although we do think the species is close to extinction in Alabama and the USA.

There is some interpretive confusion between the last sighting and last specimen amongst state biologists. The personnel were courteous and professional. In an email below it's evident that IBWO sightings without the taking of the bird for a specimen evidently delegates the few, post 1907 sightings to not worth mentioning in the opinion of some of these scientists:

"The last known observation of Ivory-billed in Alabama was in 1907." 

This may be a manifestation that most natural resource departments share; they concentrate on fish and game species and without a specimen it's all just another tale about the monster bass that got away.

However, the state was far from completely logged over by 1907; it was possible for a few forest interior birds to eke out an existence without being seen by a "crowd" or shot. Skeptical dogma set in motion the Mason Spencer shooting of an Ivory-billed in 1932. The Singer Tract was only 170 miles from Alabama; unproven skepticism that the bird existed doesn't end at state lines or after 1940.

Underestimating the difficulty of finding this bird, with a large pair range, even when there, continues to this day.

By 1850 a large, east to west swath of central Alabama was already partially logged over. By 1926 about 40 forested areas of 25,000 acres each existed according to the USDA (see below). In the 1930s Tanner briefly visited a few pertinent IB forests of Alabama and found them cutover. Tanner missed counting 12 birds in Mississippi, alive in the late 1930s.

The 40 forested Alabama areas, totaling, 1,000,000 acres of virgin forest that stood until at least 1926, likely held IBs in Alabama past the "last confirmed" sighting of 1907.

Did these forty, 25,000 acres areas of virgin forest in Alabama have any Ivory-bills after decades of post Civil War poverty and associated subsistence hunting? The many rifle wielding outdoorsmen moved interstitially between the cotton and tobacco fields and into the shaded forests; some of them went hungry if bloodied fur or feathers didn't reach the pot.

          

1926 Virgin Forest 1,000,000 acres Alabama

Email response from Alabama to questions:                          

From: Alabama DCNR
Sent: Friday, September 1, 2023 11:15 AM
To: National Biodiversity Parks <; GOV>
Subject: RE: Ivory-billed Woodpecker ALABAMA

Historically, Alabama has conducted symposiums to bring together experts covering each taxa group, birds included, periodically to address rare and endangered animals in Alabama and to assess their status, provide management and conservation measures for those species, and to review species lists for the state.

The first of this type symposium was conducted in 1972, with a follow up a few short years later with a second publication coming out in 1976. At both of these meetings, Ivory-billed Woodpecker was discussed. The last known observation of Ivory-billed in Alabama was in 1907. Expert and well-known ornithologists of Alabama came together and agreed on the language that you see in the attached species accounts, that it was ‘highly doubtful if any Ivory-billed Woodpeckers occur in Alabama’ and ‘The Ivory-billed Woodpecker may now be extinct’.

In the 40+ years since these publications, many trained ornithologists have spent time throughout the state and significant time down in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta region, where one would suspect an Ivory-billed Woodpecker to be if there are any in the state, and have not heard or seen any signs of the species, or any indication that would lead us to change the status of the bird in Alabama.

We have not gotten any credible reports of IBWO in Alabama in the time that I have been with the state, since 2010, that would cause us to adjust the current status of the bird in Alabama.

 Nongame Wildlife Program Coordinator

 

Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries

64 N. Union Street, Suite 584

Montgomery, AL 36130
- - - - - 

Results of years of advanced point survey dta for Ivory-bills by NBP. Exact locations removed. 

Survey Method Comments

Any brief, formal surveying in Alabama done by Cornell University (CLO, Mobile Team) per the Ivory-billed Recovery Plan was poorly designed.

All the Ivory-billed Mobile Team data utilizing anthropogenic double knocks (ADKs) in the SE USA circa 2006 –09 is suspect; it likely produced false negatives by alerting or driving away IBs before they were detected. It should not be used as evidence by the USFWS, any entity, or anyone to declare Ivory-billed absence vs presence in any surveyed areas of Alabama or elsewhere.

Cornell University (CLO, Mobile Team) utilized survey methods that erroneously extrapolated the vigorous response rate of a territorial and non-hunted congeneric, the Pale-billed Woodpecker, to an assumed response rate of Ivory-bills. C. principalis is not territorial and was incessantly hunted sometimes by imitating and/or following the most consistently knocking individual and shooting any bird encountered for a hundred years. 

As a formally designated federal breeding bird surveyor utilizing well established USFWS methodologies National Biodiversity Parks, Inc. (NBP) used a different ADK method, getting results that were 300 % or more effective in eliciting Ivory-billed' responses than CLO's Mobile Team.  M. Lammertink (CLO) was contacted when it was discovered that CLO had been doing 14 ADKs in 6 minutes compared to NBP’s designed and approved, 2-4 ADKs in 6 minutes. 

NBP has the largest unpublished IBWO field data set for ADK responses (~ 670 data points acoustically covering over 130 square miles of good to excellent IB habitat) from 3 states and a separate control state that had no Ivory-bills. We have had Ivory-bills respond within 40 miles of SE Alabama. 

NBP's zoologists have been to Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, etc. over 30 times. Pale-billeds, etc. are embarrassingly easy to "get knocking". 

Hypothetically if we collectively hunted and shot every Pale-billed for one hundred years the remaining birds would not be liberally knocking. The literature has historical accounts of subsistence hunters or Ivory-billed collectors hearing DKs or even producing ADKs in order to locate, kill or try and kill IBs. Microevolutionary mechanisms impacted modern behavior of IBs in regard to the frequency of their knocking and kenting; the withering and unfortunate selection pressure of hunters/collectors eliminated birds that signaled excessively. 

As it was inherently obvious 20 years ago to some, it certainly has been confirmed that Ivory-bills are wary animals; forcing 7 ADKs into a minute and then another 7, five minutes after, likely repels or warns IBs that a predator is near, or at best, that the survey knocks are not being produced by a real or normal Ivory-billed. 

The disruptive, super stimuli, ADK method (CLO/USFWS 2004 method) should not be utilized for modified Ivory-billed point surveys.  

Position of The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources of Alabama on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources of Alabama follows the Alabama Ornithological Society's (AOS) official state bird list.

The AOS list is as follows:  

 Extinct/Extirpated Species

Pigeon, Passenger Woodpecker, Ivory-billed N Parakeet, Carolina Warbler, Bachman's N

 Total Species: 455

The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources of Alabama IBWO information

SCIENTIFIC NAME:

Campephilus principalis

 

STATUS:

Extirpated. Historical breeder. Listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

HABITAT:

Was found in virgin cypress and bottomland hardwood forests.

 https://www.outdooralabama.com/woodpeckers/ivory-billed-woodpecker

 

Geoff Hill PhD, is an ornithologist with Auburn University, Alabama. Hill was a co-author of a peer- reviewed paper on the evidence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Panhandle of Florida (2007) only an hour's drive from Alabama. Hill is aware of Alabama's pertinent IBWO habitat as an established field birder in the state. His well-educated opinion is that the Ivory-billed may be in Alabama.

Here are some of his comments from a recent interview:  

Choctawhatchee River, Florida  

"How possible is it that the ivory-billed woodpecker could make a reappearance?"

 

"Since ivory-billed woodpeckers are still flying around forests, at least in Florida and Louisiana and probably in Alabama and Mississippi as well, I would say that it is just a matter of time."

Hill said there’s been no recent evidence of the ivory-bill in Alabama, but areas in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta could be an ideal habitat if the bird were to make a recovery. He also said:

 

“If they are recovering, there’s plenty of habitat for them now,” he said. “The Apalachicola River system, the Choctawhatchee, the Conecuh River system, and the Mobile-Tensaw Delta are just huge wetland habitats for those birds. So, if they are able to reproduce, and their populations aren’t so small that they’ve lost all their genetic diversity, they have plenty of room to come back into.”

Ivory-billed Comments by G. Hill

 

Hill has always been a bit "forgiving" or "optimistic" on the exact type of forest habitat that the Ivory-billed needs to increase its numbers. Regardless, NBP believes there is a small chance that Ivory-bills can be occasionally breeding in very low numbers in Alabama. Ivory-bills have almost certainly been using the state to search for food, mates or appropriate breeding habitat post Singer Tract.  

The Future -- Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may or may not be extirpated in Alabama. Regardless of the reasons for past assumptions of extirpation the species is important to Alabama since one of the state's prestigious scientists from its premier university proposes that Ivory-bills may be still gracing the state.

 Hill of Auburn University Ivory-billed Book

The Ivory-billed has obvious value to outdoor recreationists of many types. Just knowing Ivory-bills are in a state or riparian corridor stimulates ecotourism and brings economic benefit to outdoor centric businesses that need customers and visitors. Birding is a growing outdoor activity stimulating hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity. 

The Ivory-billed has economic value to rural communities; the species is not an impediment to the timber industry, or hunters, if stakeholders agree that cooperative management for this species can be agreed to.  NBP has developed low impact, inexpensive methods to address this specie's needs.

As an ecological basis for economic value Ivory-bills may be more valuable than has been discussed. Increasing their numbers could have modern forestry benefits. SE USA forest productivity could be 5 to 10% higher when a state's biodiversity includes a healthy population of Ivory-bills. However it's realized by most that the recovery of the Ivory-bill has a small chance of success; regardless certain actions should take place. 

Ivory-billeds had to "break into" the seemingly crowded Picidae avifauna of the SE USA. Evolving from the parent Imperial Woodpecker, which had the prerequisite bill and body size to access the phloem and cambium feeding invertebrates earlier than any potentially sympatric Picidae species; the IB fit an open niche.

A Imperial Woodpecker B Ivory-billed Woodpecker C Pileated Woodpecker 

The phloem and cambium, under the bark, of a stressed, damaged or dying tree are relatively rich in carbohydrates and proteins. The Ivory-bills  access these xylophagous invertebrates under the bark sooner than many other species of woodpeckers, other animals, or smaller species can. 

The competitive exclusion principle, if applicable, predicts that an open niche needs to be present and then exploited to grow species richness in a biotic community. The Imperial Woodpecker had the prerequisite morphology that led to the successful speciation into the northern Campephilus clade. One million years ago, soft and hardwood trees from Proto-Texas to Proto-Alabama and elsewhere were being debarked ~ one to three years earlier than any sympatric Dryocopus could accomplish the feat.

Once some bark is removed from a trunk more cambium is exposed, and the more cellulose dominant part of the heartwood is eventually completely available to the community of fungi, bacteria, insects, woodpeckers and mammals to continue the decay process.

Ivory-bills accelerated the tree to soil cycle by several years, increasing forest productivity. More efficient SE US forests can potentially be worth billions of dollars more per annum. The past or potential economic benefits of a healthy Ivory-billed population have likely been overlooked by our natural resource managers; they are not trivial. Unfortunately it's likely too late to restore the specie's advantageous impact to forest productivity for multiple reasons. The Ivory-billed still has substantial presence value. 

NBP's scientists have been carefully examining the literature and habitat aerials of Alabama. Our point survey methods have detected Ivory-bills in a matter of weeks.

We recommend that an actual scientific method be researched, proposed and enacted to explore a few, specific areas of the state for Ivory-billeds. Only advanced, field-tested methods designed for this species can yield valid information that serves the citizens and outdoor enthusiasts that enjoy the natural resources of Alabama.  

Raw Data and resources below

Sunday, March 12, 2006
Huntsville Times

As winter recedes, crews of birdwatchers, both amateur and
professional, are still scouring the Big Woods swamps of
eastern Arkansas for the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Closer to home, some natural questions arise: Did the
ivory-billed woodpecker ever live in Alabama? If so, where
- and when? And could a bird that still exists just one state
away also still exist in Alabama?

The ivory-billed did, indeed, occur in Alabama, mainly in
the southern pine and hardwood swamps of the coastal
plain. But one portion of its range extended into northwest
Alabama, along the Buttahatchee River, a tributary of the
Tombigbee.

When? The last confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed in
Alabama occurred "about 1907," according to Arthur H.
Howell in his 1924 book "Birds of Alabama."

The time and place - in the Conecuh swamps north of Troy -
were related to Howell by C.W. Howe, a trapper.

Howe was certain about his encounter for one simple
reason: When he saw the bird, he shot and killed it.

By the time of his book, Howell wrote, the ivory-billed had
"undoubtedly" disappeared from Alabama. Indeed, since
Howe's kill of 1907, there have been no accepted sightings.

So you have to go back before Howell to records from the
19th century:

In 1838, English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse lived and
taught school for eight months in the community of Pleasant
Hill, about 18 miles south of Selma in Dallas County. Two
decades later, when he had become a prominent figure in
British science circles, Gosse published "Letters from
Alabama, Chiefly Relating to Natural History."

Gosse wrote of his encounters with the ivory-billed in the
woods of Dallas County. The pair of birds he had come
across, he wrote, were "rapping some tall dead pines, in a
dense part of the forest, which rang with their loud notes."

In describing the bird's call and plumage, Gosse clearly
knew the difference between the ivory-billed and the
pileated woodpecker.

In 1891, in an article in The Auk, the journal of the
American Ornithologists' Union, Edwin M. Hasbrouck
surveyed the status of the ivory-billed throughout its
historical range. And that range, Hasbrouck concluded, was
rapidly shrinking as habitat disappeared.

Hasbrouck's essay contains one short paragraph about
Alabama. He told of individual birds being "taken" in 1865
in Marengo County and on the Black Warrior River near
Greensboro the following year. Hasbrouck also noted the
reported 1886 sighting on the Buttahatchee River at Crump
Springs and a nesting bird in 1889 in Wilcox County.

That's about it. In 1942, in James T. Tanner's exhaustive but
readable "The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker," Tanner checked
out the locations mentioned by his predecessors, but in
Alabama he found nothing.

By 1960, when Thomas Imhof's "Alabama Birds" was
published, there was little to do except restate the earlier
records and reports.

What about today?

Bobby Harrison, the wildlife photographer and Oakwood
College professor credited as one of the co-discoverers of
the ivory-billed in Arkansas, thinks there's still a chance the
bird could be found in Alabama.

In the January-February issue of Birdwatcher's Digest,
Harrison said he thinks ivory-billeds may be hanging on in
other Southern swamps. As for Alabama, he mentions the
Tensaw Delta north of Mobile Bay and the Pea River as
possible candidates.

The ivory-billed woodpecker in Alabama? I think it's a long
shot, but in 30 years of birdwatching I've learned there's a
very big difference between the unlikely and the truly
impossible. We hope for the former - and prepare for the
latter.

John Ehinger's Birdwatching column appears monthly on
the Outdoors page.


© 2006 The Huntsville Times
© 2006 al.com All Rights Reserved.