LITTLE ROCK—A scaled-back search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker begins this week in the swamps of eastern Arkansas.

The huge bird was believed to be extinct until a sighting four years ago stirred national experts and federal funding to launch a full-blown campaign to verify the bird’s existence and study its habitat.

For want of a clean photograph or audio recordings of the bird’s distinctive sounds, searchers have been unable to convince fellow scientists that the bird has survived years of land development and loss of habitat.

Wildlife biologist Allan Mueller, who previously reported spotting the bird in 2007, heads the team this winter of 26 volunteers and three expert field biologists. After orientation meetings in Little Rock and near Brinkley, searchers will begin their work Saturday. The campaign will run through the bird’s nesting season in March and April when the ivory-bill is most active, Mueller said.

Although three previous searches involved more volunteers, more scientists, and more time in the woods, and together those searches covered about 83,000 of the 550,000-acre Big Woods where scientists believe the bird lives, Mueller feels confident he and his team will get results.

“We’re going to find a big black and white woodpecker,” he says flatly.

Over the last four years, The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas, where Mueller is avian conservation manager, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the Arkansas Audubon Society have collaborated on the effort to study the ivory-bill in Arkansas and enlist other groups to scout potential habitat in other Southern states.

Besides Arkansas, researchers say the bird has been seen and heard in the swamps of northwestern Florida. A Cornell team, which in previous years headed the Arkansas search, will begin looking this year in Florida and travel to Arkansas and elsewhere in the Southeast to spot the bird.

Mueller reminds fishermen, hunters, and the general public that they can help, too, by calling his office if they have a sighting. An anonymous donor has pledged a $50,000 reward to anyone who leads the team to a live ivory-bill, he said.

The Big Woods swallow up the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where kayaker Gene Sparling spotted the bird Feb. 11, 2004, and Cornell University experts made subsequent sightings.

The volunteers this year will split up into five teams, and each will cover an area of the Cache, the White River National Wildlife Refuge, Dagmar Wildlife Management Area, or the Wattensaw Wildlife Management Area, where Mueller made his sighting. A person from each team will search the designated area once a month so that someone will be in that locale at least once a week, Mueller said.

Searchers will spend at least six hours a day in the woods, including sunrise or sunset, when the bird is most active. They will look for cavities of the size and shape used by ivory-bills and for signs of a fresh feeding. Once they identify these, the group will fix a remote camera on them.

Each search team will use a double-knocker to attract the woodpecker. The wooden box is strapped to a tree and hit with hinged wooden dowels to replicate the sound the bird makes with its bill.

The three field biologists will search every day, Mueller said, and also will use a CD player to broadcast the bird’s distinctive “kent” call and attract the bird.



To report a sighting, call The Nature Conservancy in Arkansas at 501-614-5092.