Nick Mott: There’s a bird that, depending on who you ask, hasn’t been seen in the better part of a century.
Its colors are striking: black and white, and males have a fez of red at the top of their skulls sweeping backward. This bird is notoriously wary of humans, and it’s big – about the size of a crow.
Remember Woody Woodpecker?
That manic laugh, I should note, is not what the bird in questions is thought to sound like. But, that cartoon bird was inspired by this one. It’s called the ivory-billed woodpecker.
This bird also looks a lot like something much more common: a pileated woodpecker. And therein lies part of the problem.
For decades, people have been trying to find the ivory bill, convinced it’s still out there, despite many – including the federal government – claiming it’s gone extinct. But some avid birders are convinced it still exists. Some think they’ve seen it.
This is The Wide Open. I’m Nick Mott. Today: A bird lost to extinction, or maybe just the deep, dark Southern hardwood forest. The search for the ivory-billed woodpecker.
The ivory bill has captured the imagination of the birding community for decades. It’s earned names from avid searchers, cultures, and regional dialects: the Van Dyke, the Kent, the Titka. But maybe the most famous stemmed from a sensation, the sheer shock of seeing the bird in the first place. People who saw the bird, it was said, proclaimed “Lord god, what a bird!” when they spotted it. Today, it’s dubbed “the lord God bird.”
I wanted to talk with one of the few people who could make that exclamation today.
All right, I just pulled up to David's house in Little Rock after a very long drive, and I know I'm at the right place because his red Chevy Bolt EV in his garage area here says I B W O. It's the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
David Luneau recently retired from 31 years teaching electronics and computer engineering technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He also runs a website devoted to the Ivory Bill, IBWO.org. These days, he’s an avid tennis player, and still very much a tinkerer. He runs a solar-powered boating competition and he makes cameras for bird researchers.
He’s also a bit of a legend in this very niche, but also quite large part of the birding community, devoted to finding the Ivory Bill. In fact, David put me up for the night and I spotted ivory bills around his house, including on the label of some homemade wine he and his wife made.
To understand how he made waves in the birding world, how the ivory bill made it into his home and onto his wine bottles, we got to go back in time just a bit. In the early aughts, there had been a flurry of ivory bill sightings. A devoted birder, David had grown entranced by the ivory bill, and he went on a long expedition to Louisiana to search for it. He didn’t have any luck. But then, he got wind that there just might have been another sighting a little closer to home, posted online.
David Luneau: There was a cryptic message in a canoe forum that said 'I saw a large black and white woodpecker, but the colors seemed to be reversed from a pileated. And you, you birders will know what I'm talking about, but I don't have the conviction to say it.'
Nick Mott: He must be talking about the ivory bill, David surmised. Ivory bills have seized nearly everybody who’s seen them in one way or another. Indigenous groups traded them, early white settlers sold them at steamboat stops, and now they have a sort of mythical status in the birding community. For some birders, the bird is sort of the holy grail. That’s because the last sighting everybody agreed on was in the 1940s. Nobody’s managed to take a clear photo or video since.
Think about that. In recent years, videographers have managed to capture even some of the most elusive and rare creatures on the planet: The snow leopard, the giant squid. Some thought, if the thing still exists, to document it would shake up the birding world. Others were convinced the opposite, if it was still out there, we would've been able to prove it by now.
The cause of the bird's decline was, in large part, logging in Southern bottomland hardwood forests after the Civil War. Their habitat, this deep dark old growth woods, was divided and destroyed. One writer about the flashy, large bird said, “It was their bad luck that, like so many other big, bright, and beautiful things that, once they became rare, they also became extremely valuable.” That value was to hunters and even to scientists, who, as ivory bill populations plummeted, wanted to find specimens – meaning dead birds – to document a life that was soon to blink out.
And now here’s David, who gets wind that maybe this bird has turned up more or less in his backyard.
David Luneau: It's a bird that was presumed extinct, or possibly extinct, depending on which, uh, adverb you want to use there. Here it was, it was an hour and 10 minutes from my house. And it was just, it was impossible to turn that opportunity down.
I would get up at like four in the morning, come over here, put the canoe in, search for two hours or so, put the canoe back on the car, drive back home, shower up, go teach class, go to bed that night, get up the next morning, do the same thing.
Nick Mott: In fact, David was telling me this as we drove to the very spot where he’d often put in in his canoe in those days, on the Bayou deVieux River. It’s …
David Luneau: … The Big Woods of Arkansas
Nick Mott: It’s a cypress/tupelo swamp. These big, majestic trees. Slow-flowing water. There was a small community of birders searching back then, and the exciting thing was, people were actually seeing the bird. Or at least thought they were.
David Luneau: We had a conference call every Tuesday night and on every call when somebody would report that one of the searchers had seen a bird, my first question was always, did they get a video of it? So, no, but they got their binoculars on it.
Nick Mott: Nobody could get a photo or a video. David said every birder’s instinct is to go for their binoculars when they see something. The camera would be next up, but by then it’d be too late; the bird, so wary of people, would have flown off.
One fateful morning in 2004, something happened that changed David’s life. We pulled up to the put in to retrace his steps that day.
David Luneau: It brings back a lot of, a lot of old memories. Every now and then when we come … I'll exit here and just go drive to the bridge and just look for a little bit. But I haven't been actually hiking in, in the woods here in probably five to 10 years.
Nick Mott: It was October and there hadn’t been much rain lately. We’d be walking instead of floating.
David hasn’t been here in a while. We each have, I think, small hopes of seeing something that could hint the bird has been here. People were searching at the time for the ivory bill, but mostly elsewhere in the South. But who knows? We could luck out. It could be here. It’s exciting.
Right off the bat, David shows off his bird knowledge.
David Luneau: I hear golden crown kinglets. They're a winter bird here. It sounds like they're back.
Nick Mott: Dappled light filters through the canopy above, recently fallen leaves crunch as we walk. We’re dodging what David calls “Cypress knees” – these knobby stumps that are a real hazard to trip over, especially when you’re constantly looking up for birds.
Before long, he notices woodpecker sign: bark that’s been scaled off trees.
To be clear, the scaling we see is likely other species, not the ivory bill. But exciting nonetheless. Then, David hears woodpeckers, too.
David Luneau: Pileated woodpecker … in the distance. I don't know if your mic was sensitive enough to pick that up.
Nick Mott: As the day goes on, constantly looking up at what’s above, I notice I’m getting sore.
Do you feel like you have strong neck muscles from just looking up all the time?
David Luneau: Yeah, we call that warbler neck in the spring when you go down to, uh, High Island, Texas and look for the warblers coming across the gulf and your, your, your back's arched and your neck's back as far as you can get it, it's best to take a lounge chair and lay down so you don't get the warbler neck,
Nick Mott: Finally, my warbler neck getting worse, we make it to our destination. We find this telltale big old tree. And the memory seems to come back to David like a flood. That day in 2004, he was in a little canoe with a friend. David wanted to make sure he didn’t repeat the same error of so many sightings before him in the unlikely event they happened upon an ivory bill. So, he had a plan. He had a video camera perched next to him, constantly rolling. If they saw something, all he’d have to do was point and it would, theoretically, capture the bird.
David and the other birder came around a bend in the creek and turned off the motor. In silence, there was a flurry of motion. A flash of black and white as something flew away. From here, to fully reconstruct what went down, I’m going to jump back and forth between my time with David in the car and hiking around in the swamp.
David Luneau: The bird took off from the side of a tree about, I think it was about 60 ft from us at the time …
Nick Mott: David never had a chance to grab his camera. But by happy accident, it was pointing in generally the right direction. It was angled just off the boat, with his companion in focus. When he got home and reviewed the footage, there it was, this blur in the background of the video.
David Luneau: No button that says ‘enhance’.
Nick Mott: But the out of focus blur had a definite white that looked to be on the top of its wings as it fluttered away. It was a pattern, he thought, that just couldn’t match a pileated woodpecker, which had much more black on that part of its anatomy.
David Luneau: I didn't draw any immediate conclusions. I was trying to be very scientific about this and not proactive about trying to tell everybody I had an ivory bill video. Deep down inside I thought it probably was, but I wanted to be able to prove that before claiming that it was.
Nick Mott: A few weeks later, he held a small watch party at his house.
David Luneau: It was like showing a home movie and having all your cousins over.
Nick Mott: Other searchers came over, along with some folks from Cornell University’s prestigious Lab of Ornithology. John Fitzpatrick was director at the time,
David Luneau: We've got a projector played, played it through the projector onto a screen and let them all see it. And there were a lot of oohs and ahs. In fact, after the first sighting, first showing of the video, John Fitzpatrick reached out his hand and said, "man, you got it."
Nick Mott: So began a renewed round of searching. Cornell spearheaded a massive search: 22 paid employees, more than 100 volunteers. They’d systematically scour the Big Woods.
David Luneau: The day they all arrived we did kind of the same thing. The video watch party to give a presentation on what we had … the evidence why they were there … told them what it was, told him the importance of keeping this quiet. Don't tell your friends, don't tell your parents, don't tell your siblings. The secrecy is of the utmost importance until we know more about this bird.
Nick Mott: This was a top-secret mission because of what happens when word of a rare bird gets out: Birders flock in. Researchers worried that the influx of tourists and birders to this area could make the bird leave, and ruin some of the only habitat it had left – if it was, in fact, there.
By 2005, the team had made strides. They’d set up camera traps, waited in blinds, scoured the woods with life-size diagrams of ivory bill cavities, tried out some experimental aerials devices, and set up microphones to capture ivory bill audio. They even made true-to-life dolls of ivory bills to recreate David’s video to make sure what they could see in that blurry footage lined up what the bird would look like. By early spring 2005, team members had 14 possible sightings, four of which were especially promising. They’d recorded possible ivory bill noises, too. But nobody managed to make a good photo or video of the bird. The cherry on top of this birding sundae, though, was David’s blurry video of that bird flapping away.
The team felt like it was enough to publish, and in April 2005, word leaked out to the press, who took it and ran with it. Suddenly, the ivory bill was everywhere.
David Luneau: It just went viral across the birding world.
Nick Mott: Science Magazine, arguably the most prestigious journal in the field, featured an illustration of an ivory bill on the cover. The article was titled: “Ivory-billed woodpecker persists in Continental North America.”
David Luneau: It was pretty amazing for the first week or so. I mean, I got emails, scads of emails, countless emails. I don't know how many from people that I had searched with before, people just never heard of before, grads of the Tory.
… it was quite the, uh, quite the thrill there for a while. A lot of, a lot of attention given to it. After the announcement I did write at a hundred presentations, so about, I was doing about two per week at various places.
Nick Mott: But soon, it became clear that not everybody was convinced they’d found proof of the ivory bill. Two scientists were ready to publish a rebuttal, but then they listened to the highlights of the over 17,000 hours of audio captured by the research team. Nearly a century ago, birders captured these telltale noises, specifically, a nasally, “kent”-call, what David describes as something like a toy tin trumpet.
The research team captured strikingly similar sounds, as well as other characteristic noises, like a ‘double-knock,’ or distinctive drumming pattern of ivory-bills’ beaks on trees. They weren’t definitive, they could have come from the beating of a duck’s wings, or a blue jay vocalizing. But the skeptical scientists thought it was enough. They didn’t publish their rebuttal.
Then, another group of well-known bird folks published a critique that made a splash.
David Luneau: I don't know how you tell people what they didn't see, but some people have the nerve to do that and put it off as mass hysteria where it's called faith based ornithology.
Nick Mott: At the helm of the resistance to the ivory bill’s rediscovery was David Allen Sibley, famed bird illustrator and author of field guides.
David Luneau: And they … came up with some drawings and some schemes of how the bird allegedly was supposed to fly and why all that white we were seeing was from the leading edge of the underside of a pileated woodpecker's wing.
Nick Mott: Sibley and his colleagues argued that the video was playing tricks on our collective eyes. The flashes of white that appeared to be on top of the wings were in fact on their underside. The bird was likely a pileated, not an ivory bill. The video, in short, was inconclusive. The broader birding community, talking this all over in forums and email chains, was divided. Many people argued that we ought to collectively devote our resources to birds and habitats we know are in trouble. Not this borderline mystical bird that may or may not even exist.
David, though, still wonders what might’ve happened if he’d made just the slightest of tweaks to his camera setup that day.
David Luneau: If I had turned it 45 degrees to the left, that bird flying off the tree would have been in excellent focus. And we wouldn't be having all these arguments. But … can't fix the past.
Nick Mott: The debate was never fully resolved. By the time I tromped around the Big Woods with David, there had been more expeditions, more claimed sightings, more blurry, bigfoot-like field recordings, but no clear, irrefutable evidence that the bird still existed.
In fact, the ivory bill was back in the news at the time. There had been these new sightings and studies, which included some game cam footage that David found particularly compelling.
But something else was happening, too. At the same time that some people were getting more hope than ever the bird was still hiding away in the South, the federal government was claiming the bird had gone extinct. The Fish and Wildlife Service had proposed a rule to delist the bird from Endangered Species Act protections, asserting that, after all this time, it was likely done for.
David did not buy this idea.
David Luneau: Maybe once every year or two, I'll just pull up the video because somebody will ask me about it or something. I'll look at it. And every time I see it, I've just, I'm even more convinced when I see those flashes of white, think, you know, I see a lot of pileated woodpeckers and they just don't flash by. Just, there's no way that bird could be a pileated woodpecker … I'm as convinced now as I was then. Nothing's really changed. There's been no evidence to come out to say this is all flawed.
Nick Mott: David’s one of hundreds of people, probably more, who’ve put in countless hours searching for this thing nobody can prove without a doubt still exists. There’s a fundamental hopefulness here.
What gives you the optimism that they're still alive?
David Luneau: Well, I mean, a lot of people see them, and a lot of reliable people, I mean. When we had the sightings here, they were by … degreed, trained, field worthy ornithologists. So, I mean, why would I doubt what they saw? Now, do I think they're out of the woods and totally recovered? No, I think they're critically endangered. I have no idea how many there are. Probably not a whole lot. Because if there were a whole lot, they'd be a lot easier to find, you would think.
Nick Mott: What about them do you think just seizes so many people? Like, you know, it captured the nation in a lot of ways when your video was publicized and the paper came out.
David Luneau: Probably the rarity and the idea of, uh, I mean who doesn't like a treasure hunt, right? And finding something you thought was lost. You hear that every now and then. Some more famous cases of, like, the coelacanth, which was thought to be extinct for, what, millions of years, I think. And they found those.
Nick Mott: This was a fish that was rediscovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. There was also the black-naped pheasant pigeon, a bird thought extinct in Papua New Guinea until it was captured on video just a few years ago. The black browed babbler was rediscovered in Borneo in 2020, 170 years after its last sighting. Heck, people thought black-footed ferrets were extinct until one showed up on a Wyoming ranch in 1981. Some people call these things that people believe went extinct and then turn up again Lazarus species.
David Luneau: Don't know, I guess there's something in us that likes to find lost things and have hope that things have survived.
Nick Mott: Yeah, I think there's some real optimism that, you know, maybe we haven't messed up the world so irreparably. That if the ivory bill could still be out there it says something hopeful in that maybe we haven’t messed up the world so irreparable … there’s something hopeful that maybe we can save other things too.
To me, this is why I was so fascinated by the ivory bill story in the first place. Personally, I have no idea if the ivory bill is or isn’t out there. I’m kind of agnostic about the bird. But the search is something meaningful. Retaining this kind of hope that the bird is still out there is to hope that there are parts of the world, even parts of the highly developed U.S. South, that we haven’t polluted and bulldozed and logged into oblivion. It represents hope that we can reverse course and undo some of the damage we’ve wrought.
As I rambled to him about these ideas, David kept on walking, contemplating.
David Luneau: I think that's well said.
Nick Mott: On our short expedition, David and I don't find any sign of the ivory bill. Which isn’t particularly surprising.
Do you think they could still be in this area?
David Luneau: I mean, they could be. Yeah. I mean, how, and you don't know if you don't look. We did our little part today, but we didn't really look very hard. Yeah, we did a little too much talking compared to looking. Talking and walking are probably not the best ways to find it.
Nick Mott: Fortuitously, on my drive away from David’s house, news broke. The Fish and Wildlife Service announced that they weren’t going to delist the ivory-billed woodpecker. They didn’t go so far as to assert it still exists. They said they’ll continue to analyze and review the information before making a decision one way or another. So the search for this long-lost, brilliant and reclusive bird continues.
The Wide Open is a production of Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab. This extra was written and reported by me, Nick Mott. Thanks to David Luneau for the hospitality, Corin Cates-Carney for the edits, and Izaak Opatz and Dylan Rodrigue for the music.
Thanks for listening. I’m Nick Mott.
