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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

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Total Clips: 8

	Date	Outlet
Once-extinct bird found by Auburn University researchers	09/26/2006	Opelika-Auburn News
Woodpecker not so extinct after all, U of W prof finds	09/26/2006	Windsor Star, The
New Claim for Evidence of Ivory Bills	09/26/2006	New York Times, The
Auburn group believes it has sighted ivory-billed woodpecker	09/26/2006	Anniston Star
Alive and pecking?	09/26/2006	Toronto Star
More evidence of ivory-bill bird found in Florida	09/26/2006	Huntsville Times
Birders excited about woodpecker sightings	09/26/2006	Press-Register
Video iPods part of AUs MBA tuition	09/26/2006	Montgomery Advertiser


Once-extinct bird found by Auburn University researchers 09/26/2006 Opelika-Auburn News Staff report		Return to Top
A research team led by Auburn University professor Geoff Hill has compiled evidence that a population of ivory-billed woodpeckers exists in a remote river basin in the panhandle of Florida, as reported today in Avian Conservation & Ecology, an electronic scientific journal at www.ace-eco.org. "The ivory-billed woodpecker, so impressive it was called the 'Lord God Bird' in some regions, was thought to be extinct for more than 50 years," Hill said. "Now, there is new hope for scientists, naturalists and birders that these birds persist in the panhandle of Florida." The news follows the rediscovery of the bird in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas in 2004, confirmed by the results of researchers' efforts announced in 2005 documenting the existence of at least one male ivory-bill. Hill, an author, professor and ornithologist in AU's College of Science and Mathematics, led a kayaking expedition in May 2005 with two research assistants, Tyler Hicks and Brian Rolek, along a section of the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida panhandle. Soon after they started their float, Rolek observed an ivory-bill in flight and Hill heard a double knock, the signature sound of the ivory-bill. Numerous large cavities in trees and places where thick, tightly adhering bark had been scaled from dead trees added impetus to the sighting. "It was just to be a weekend outing looking for potential habitat," said Hill, who at the time was writing a book about bird coloration. "We really never dreamed we'd actually find an ivory-bill." Hill and his assistants made subsequent visits to the area, located near the town of Bruce, Fla., in an effort to better document the birds. On the weekend after their initial discovery, Hicks, an expert in bird identification, got a clear view of a female ivory-billed woodpecker, which has distinct plumage, including a white trailing edge on the upper wing, white stripes down the back and an all black crest. Hill then organized a follow-up search of the area and invited Dr. Dan Mennill, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario, to join the search team. Mennill, who is an expert at recording and analyzing animal sounds, devised a means to remotely record sounds in the swamp and erected seven listening stations in the area of the ivory-bill sightings. "The regular, ongoing reports from Dr. Hill and his research team for the past 16 months have provided me an extraordinarily captivating and rewarding experience," said Stewart Schneller, dean of the AU College of Science and Mathematics. "In turn, the excitement that exists with the anticipation of their future investigations is beyond description." While the Auburn and Windsor scientists are confident in their discovery that ivory-billed woodpeckers persist in the swamp forests along the Choctawhatchee, they realize that the evidence amassed to date is not conclusive proof. Hill emphasized that "the only evidence that would constitute irrefutable proof is a clear photograph or video of an ivory-billed woodpecker, and such an image has to date eluded us." From May 2005 to May 2006, however, the Auburn/Windsor research team recorded 14 sightings of ivory-bills, including two by Hill. From more than 10,000 hours of audio recordings, Mennill and his research assistant Kyle Swiston have identified more than 300 sounds that match descriptions of ivory-billed woodpeckers. They located 20 cavities with entrances within the range recorded for ivory-billed woodpeckers, but larger than the entrances to the cavities typically created by other birds in this area. And they noted numerous dead trees on which thick, tightly adhering bark has been scaled cleanly away, which fits the description of ivory-bill feeding marks. The scientists encourage people to listen to the recordings and view photographs taken during the expeditions at www.auburn.edu/ivorybill. Based on their evidence, Hill and Mennill will expand their search for ivory-billed woodpeckers in the Choctawhatchee River basin in the winter and spring of next year. But first, the Hill/Mennill team will be in Veracruz, Mexico, next week to present its findings at the North American Ornithological Conference on Oct. 4.
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Woodpecker not so extinct after all, U of W prof finds 09/26/2006 Windsor Star, The Monica Wolfson		Return to Top
A University of Windsor professor and a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists have collected strong evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker, once thought extinct, is flying and pecking in the Florida panhandle. In an article published today in the journal 'Avian Conservation and Ecology,' a Canadian scientific publication, Windsor ornithologist Daniel Mennill and Geoff Hill, an Auburn University biologist, detail evidence collected discretely over the past year that seems to prove the elusive, secretive woodpecker lives in the thick canopy forest along the Choctawhatchee River. Between January and April, five Canadian and U.S. researchers camped out in the isolated Florida swamp and saw the bird 14 times as well as collected 11,419 hours of forest sounds.'We were in a canoe and it (flew by us) on an upward angle over the trees,' said Kyle Swiston, a Windsor biological sciences graduate student. 'It wasn't a good sighting, but it's got a distinctive shape and wing pattern. I'm very confident it wasn't a pileated woodpecker.'The common pileated woodpecker, which lives throughout North America, is often mistaken for the ivory-billed woodpecker because the two have similar colouring. Mennill speculated the bird survived in obscurity because it lives in an inhospitable swamp with few human visitors. The discovery could show that woodpeckers are able to survive in much smaller colonies than previously thought. While researchers heard the unique songs and pecking rhythm associated with the woodpecker 44 times, it wasn't until a team of Windsor students listened to thousands of hours of digitally recorded swamp music that evidence of the bird's existence poured in. Researchers documented the ivory-billed woodpecker's distinctive double-knock pounding sound on 99 occasions and its trilling trumpet call 210 times from Mennill's seven recording stations. While no nest was found, researchers measured 131 cavities in old forest trees and 20 are too large to be explained by any other swamp creature. Researchers say they spotted three ivory-billed woodpeckers, while only one was reported in Arkansas in 2004. This is the second sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 62 years -- it hasn't been officially seen since 1944 -- which led many ornithologists to believe the bird was extinct. The bird lived in old forest cypress trees, which were heavily logged. And as the birds began to disappear, hunters began collecting the increasingly rare woodpecker as trophies. The Arkansas discovery also included audio recordings, but it became controversial after field guide book authors cast doubt on the finding because the only visual evidence was a grainy video.'The (Windsor) acoustic evidence is very interesting,' said Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at Cornell University lab of ornithology, which explored the Arkansas finding. 'They have more variations of the sounds that they are excited about. But what it points to is we are interpreting what we hear. It can't be definitive evidence.'
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New Claim for Evidence of Ivory Bills 09/26/2006 New York Times, The James Gorman		Return to Top
This story also appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Deseret Morning News. Once again, scientists report they have found evidence of ivory-billed woodpeckers, this time in Florida. But having observed the turbulent disputes among ornithologists and birders that followed the report last year that the bird had been found in Arkansas, these researchers are proceeding with caution. Geoffrey Hill, of Auburn University in Alabama, and Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor, in Ontario, both biologists and ornithologists, say 14 sightings and extensive sound recordings "provide evidence that ivory-billed woodpeckers may live along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida Panhandle." The report appears online in a Canadian journal, Avian Conservation and Ecology (www.ace-eco.org). The ivory bill, the largest woodpecker in the United States, was thought to have gone extinct until scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and others reported in Science that at least one had been seen and videotaped in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. That claim was at first widely accepted and then vigorously disputed by bird experts and academic ornithologists who argued that the bird in a few seconds of blurry videotape cited in Science was a pileated woodpecker, a smaller, quite common bird. An extensive search in Arkansas last winter led by the Cornell lab did not produce conclusive evidence. Dr. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell lab, who had consulted with Dr. Hill about the findings before publication, said, "They’ve got a lot of intriguing evidence." "This is a perfect illustration of the fact that we need to get a multigroup multistate, comprehensive range-wide search for this bird undertaken," Dr. Fitzpatrick said. David Sibley, author of "The Sibley Guide to Birds," a critic of the report on the Arkansas bird, called the Florida report "intriguing", but said it "really provides very little evidence for the existence of Ivory-bills there." In a phone interview, Dr. Hill said only an indisputable photograph or DNA evidence would be scientifically conclusive. He said he knew how heated the subject of ivory bills had become, but asked, "Once we found them, what was I supposed to do?" "The mistake," he added dryly, "was ever looking for them."
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Auburn group believes it has sighted ivory-billed woodpecker 09/26/2006 Anniston Star John Fleming, Editor at Large		Return to Top
AUBURN – Researchers from Auburn University say they have evidence suggesting ivory-billed woodpeckers dwell in a swamp along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida Panhandle. In an article scheduled to be published Tuesday in the scholarly journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, the main author and group leader, ornithologist Geoff Hill, says the evidence includes a collection of 210 separate recordings of the birds' vocalization, known as "kent calls," as well as 99 recordings of "double raps," a sound the birds are thought to make when their bills hit a tree. Hill also says he and others in the group sighted the birds 14 times in mid-2005 and again between December 2005 and April 2006, when the group set up a permanent camp in the Choctawhatchee basin south of the Alabama state line near Geneva. "I am 100 percent positive that I saw an ivory-bill," Hill told The Star in an interview from his campus office, recounting a sighting in early January 2006. He added that the group also made two separate sightings of pairs of the birds flying together. The last known recording of an ivory-billed woodpecker was in Louisiana in a swampy area known as the Singer Track in 1935. Only occasional sightings of the birds were reported after that, so few that many scientists concluded the species was extinct. Renewed interest in the bird emerged in the late 1990s, with a reported sighting in Louisiana and then last year in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. That research included blurry video footage and recordings of kent calls. Hill, however, believes that what his team found in the Choctawhatchee is stronger than what has been presented from Arkansas because of the multi-layered body of evidence his team collected. "I think we have the best evidence suggesting an ivory-bill may exist since the Singer Track," said Hill, the author of dozens of journal articles as well as three books on birds. Ken Rosenberg is the director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a member of the Ivory Bill recovery team, which was organized by the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service. "This research seems very encouraging, but by itself is not definitive. Some of the audio recordings sound perfect. So in terms of clarity, they are very nice recordings. But when you try to match them against the 1935 recording, it isn't exact." On the Net Read the full peer-reviewed article and hear the audio on the journal’s Web site: www.ace-eco.org View photos of the team’s work in the Choctawhatchee: www.uwindsor.ca/ivorybill Read the NPR story on the 2005 Arkansas sightings: www.npr.org Hear archival recordings of the ivory-billed woodpecker at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology sound library: www.animalbehaviorarchive.org Rosenberg went on to say that birds from different regions can have different dialects and this may account for the slight difference. The Cornell lab is eager to work with the Auburn researchers and has given technical advice and is supplying equipment for the upcoming research trip, he said. He also said, "That environment is very conducive to them. Those rivers in the Florida Panhandle were the mother load of the ivory-bill woodpecker." Although it had camera equipment, Hill says the team "did not get that clear a picture," of the bird. "We set out to prove that there are ivory-bills there. In that, we failed. It was a success, however, in that we have evidence." While praising the support of Auburn (the university provided a grant of $10,000 from a discretionary fund) Hill said that, "If we would have had more people and money we would have found what was making those kent calls and those double knocks." He also added, "I can't imagine how we could be wrong," and asked, “What else could be making that noise? Nothing in nature we know of. There might be something we don’' know of.” Without clear photographic evidence, Hill says he knows there will be a lot of criticism of his team's findings, but he also says he welcomes that criticism. His colleague and co-author of the journal article, Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor in Ontario, said in a telephone interview that, "We expect a lot of questions and a lot of skeptics. But we appreciate a healthy degree of skepticism." Jerome A. Jackson, a professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, an ornithologist and the author of the book, In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, was a critic of the research findings in Arkansas. "Arkansas is on the fringe of what was known to be the range of the ivory-bill," Jackson said from the Atlanta airport on his way to give a lecture in Alaska. "The heart of ivory-bill country is in the Florida Panhandle. I would expect them to show up there," said Jackson, considered by many to be a foremost expert on ivory-bills. Although Jackson calls the Auburn findings, "very exciting," he cautions that, "it is not conclusive." Hill and Mennill also point to the recordings that suggest more than one possible ivory-billed woodpecker, especially recordings on 11 days when the team recorded kent calls and double knocks on the same recording device. Additionally, they say, on two occasions the kent calls of two birds were heard at the same time. David Sibley, a well-known illustrator of birds, who is also a critic of the Arkansas research, wrote in an email to The Star that since he hadn’t seen Hill’s research yet, he couldn’t comment. He did add, however, that, “As far as I know bird identification experts are all in agreement that we’re still looking for proof that the ivory-billed survives, so if people can actually present proof from Florida that would be absolutely thrilling. The evidence from Arkansas should have been scrutinized more carefully before it was announced last year.” “That evidence doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and really doesn’t justify the claims of proof, and it simply raised a lot of false hopes.” Although the research team initially offered the findings and were ultimately rejected by the journal Nature, the strength of the audio, says Mennill and Hill, is one reason they decided to turn to Avian Conservation & Ecology, an on-line scientific journal. “It is an online journal capable of handling all of our research, including our audio recordings,” said Hill. Merrill adds that, “we have put all of our research out there for everyone to see.” As for the future, Hill plans to continue the research. While stressing that this is an Auburn University project, he hopes that publication of the article may bring in private, state and federal money. He and the team are planning to return to the area for a long-term research trip later this year. “Now we have to go back, said Hill. “Now our job is to go find what the source of all these knocks, and kent calls and what exactly these big birds are.” Researchers from Auburn University set up a permanent camp in the Choctawhatchee basin south of the Alabama state line near Geneva. Professor Geoff Hill says he and others in the group sighted ivory-billed woodpeckers 14 times. Photo: Special to The Star ‘We heard this rapping that was really loud’ How the Auburn team decided to explore the remote area south of Geneva, near Bruce, Fla., is an interesting story in itself. As ornithologist Geoff Hill tells it, he was a new professor in the mid-1990s at Auburn, laboring under a workload, trying to make tenure, juggling family and job, when one day he received a call from a man in Geneva County, whom he described as some guy in a pickup truck. The man in the pickup told a skeptical Hill that he had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker; that it was big and it flew away from him into an old growth forest along the Pea River near the city of Geneva in south Alabama. “I tried to talk him out of it,” said Hill. “I suggested that he might have seen a pileated woodpecker,” he said, explaining that the pileated woodpeckers have similar markings. The man in the pickup, however, wasn’t buying it, Hill explained. He told Hill he knew what a pileated woodpecker looked like and that what he saw was no pileated woodpecker. “I just couldn’t handle it right then,” said Hill. “But I filed it in the back of my head.” Last year, when news of the possible discovery broke in Arkansas, Hill said he thought again of the report from Geneva and started considering a trip to the area. “I had people urging me to go to Arkansas, but I really didn’t want to be part of a bird event,” he said. So in May 2005, he and two research assistants loaded up kayaks on his car and headed for southeast Alabama. They floated an area west of Geneva on the Pea River, but determined by the end of the first day that the habitat wasn’t suitable. It lacked old growth forest as well as flooded forest, something the ivory-bills were believed to prefer. At the end of the first day, they were wondering what to do when one of the assistants, Tyler Hicks, a 23-year-old professional birder from Kansas, suggested they turn their attention to the Choctawhatchee River south of Geneva. Hicks, now an undergraduate student in Colorado, said he recalled seeing an editorial in The Anniston Star referring to historic reporting sightings south of the city, where the Choctawhatchee and Pea rivers come together. That led him to look at satellite imagery of the area, which he determined to be more conducive to ivory-bills. Hicks, Hill and assistant Brian Rolek then moved onto the Choctawhatchee. “Within just an hour or so after we went into that area,” he said by phone from Colorado, “we heard this rapping that was really loud. I can only describe it as like someone beating a baseball bat against a tree. Soon after, Brian saw a large bird that had some interesting markings, and a little later Dr. Hill heard a double knock.” The team was interested, returned to Auburn, lined up some support, including Mennill, and started returning to the area in preparation for long-term stay in December. In the meantime, the more abstract moved into something electrifying one day in May 2005, when Hicks was sitting on a log deep in the stillness of a swamp on the Choctawhatchee. “Out of the corner of my eye I saw a large bird,” he said. “It had a strong flight, like a loon and I saw white and black markings, including white on the secondary feathers. When it flew upward, I saw dorsal white stripes, down the neck and over the back. Then it punched through the forest canopy.” The white secondary feathers are significant because they differentiate the ivory-bill from the pileated. The 23-year-old Hicks, who has been birding since he was 10, is described by Hill as one of the best birders he has ever known. He has worked professionally as a bird-watching guide and is studying to be an ornithologist. “I am as sure that I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker as I am about anything,” he said. “There is no way it could have been anything else.” Hicks says he made two sightings during his time on the river. To local people in this part of south Alabama and northwest Florida, the sightings are not entirely surprising. Stories of ivory-billed woodpeckers have floated out of the area around and south of Geneva for years, people from the region say. The swamps from just south of state line to Choctawhatchee Bay broaden out and the area is isolated. Don Marley, an aquaculturalist who owns land on the river near the state line and has been in the area for years, says while he has never seen an ivory-bill he isn’t surprised there is evidence of them in the area given the habitat. “South of Geneva, the river starts spreading out into the bottomlands, into swamp forests,” he said. “If I were to guess where they might be, I would say that they would be in that area.” ‘I have never come across anything like this in the United States’ While the team members are disappointed in the their failure to get a clear photograph of the bird, they all say Daniel Mennill’s audio recording devices and his work in an audio lab in Canada is the backbone of the research. As Mennill describes it, the team recorded 11,500 hours of audio between December 2005 and April 2006. Each day his assistant, a graduate student named Kyle Swiston, would paddle out through the cypress swamp to each of the seven remote recording stations to change the batteries and swap out the memory cards. Hill would collect the memory cards when he visited every few days and then stream the audio, sometime for up to 18 hours at a time, to Mennill. At the University of Windsor, Mennill had hired a team to “look,” not listen to the audio. They were trained to look for a particular signature sound imprint on one screen and would try to match that imprint to a collection of others on an adjoining screen, such as squirrels, gun shots, blue jay calls and other woodpeckers. That way they could exclude all those sounds. On the adjoining screen was also a sound signature of the Singer Track recording made in 1935 of the Ivory bill in Louisiana. Using this method allowed the technicians to exclude the other noises and concentrate on the ones suspected to be that of the ivory-bill. In Mennill’s opinion -- based on the body of evidence, especially the audio – “our evidence is convincing that we have found ivory bills.” Mennill, who is a specialist in avian sounds and has studied cousins of the ivory-bill in Central America says, “I have never come across anything like this in the United States. It reminds me of what I have heard in Central America.” MEET THE TEAM Geoff Hill, Scharnagel Professor in Auburn University’s Department of Biological Sciences. He co-authored today’s article on the ivory-billed woodpecker in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology. Daniel Mennill, assistant professor at the University of Windsor’s Department of Biological Sciences. Tyler Hicks, professional birder from Kansas who suggested the team turn its attention to the Choctawhatchee River south of Geneva. He now is an undergraduate student in Colorado. Kyle Swiston, graduate student at University of Windsor. He kept watch over the remote recording stations in Florida’s Choctawhatchee River. About John Fleming: John Fleming is The Star's editor at large. Contact John Fleming: E-mail: johnfleming2005@bellsouth.net
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Alive and pecking? 09/26/2006 Toronto Star Peter Calamai, Science Writer		Return to Top
Ivory-billed woodpeckers, believed extinct until recently, have been seen 14 separate times since May last year along a remote Florida panhandle river, a team of Canadian and U.S. bird researchers have announced. One American researcher spotted two of the huge woodpeckers at the same time, strongly suggesting that a breeding population of Ivory-bills has managed to survive on the Choctawhatchee River even if wiped out elsewhere across North America and in Cuba. Struggling on a shoestring budget and battling alligators and water moccasin snakes, the team also recorded hundreds of distinctive vocal calls and rapping used by the woodpeckers to communicate, found a score of recent tree-nesting cavities of the right size and identified dozens of the bird's unique chisel marks on bark. "I think they're all up and down the river," said University of Windsor professor Dan Mennill, a 32-year-old biologist specializing in bird sounds and team co-leader. Yet despite visiting the area regularly since last May and camping out there continuously for almost six months, the researchers from Windsor and from Auburn University in Alabama failed to photograph the magnificent bird. The Ivory-billed woodpecker is not difficult for experienced birders to identify. Bigger than a crow, it is flamboyantly marked with a red crest, yellow eyes, a gleaming white bill and white feathers at the trailing edge of the wings. "We need the kind of photograph that will convince people who are skeptical," said Mennill, who didn't see the bird himself during an eight-day visit to the area. He explained that the team members paddling along the Choctawhatchee instinctively grabbed for binoculars rather than cameras when they spotted a likely bird. The head of natural history at the Royal Ontario Museum, bird researcher Allan Baker, agreed that a photograph of the woodpecker is essential to remove all doubt. "It would be great news. There's always a chance that you'll find a species thought to be extinct if you search difficult habitats that people haven't checked out thoroughly," he said. In December, the Windsor-Auburn team plans a major expedition to nail the identification, by training automatic cameras at promising tree cavities, carrying high-quality video gear, using remote listening posts to quickly find Ivory-bill hot spots and dispatching as many as 20 field investigators instead of the lonely two students who camped there this past winter and spring. "All those excuses will be gone," said Geoffrey Hill, the Auburn University ornithologist and bird feather expert who launched the search in May 2005. An experienced birder as well as a respected researcher, Hill was involved in two of the 14 sightings. Researchers from Auburn accounted for the other 12, sharing one with a Windsor graduate student Kyle Swiston. "Each of us could have shot an Ivory-billed by now because we had time to raise a shotgun. But video cameras are really hard to point compared to binoculars and shotguns," Hill said in an interview. Many ornithologists and bird-watchers remain skeptical about the woodpecker's survival despite a few seconds of blurry video of a large bird with white wing markings recorded on Arkansas's Cache River in 2004 and made public last year. Even though flocks of birders later descended on the area, no one claimed to have spotted an Ivory-billed afterwards. Retired Toronto lawyer Peter Gilchrist was among the birders who trekked to Arkansas, spending five days there last November in a fruitless search for ivory-bills. Asked if he would go to the Florida panhandle, Gilchrist instantly replied: "Absolutely. I was even thinking of going this week. It's the grail for birders, possibly come back from the dead on our doorstep." The scientists are calling upon amateur bird watchers for help in searching other promising river basins in the panhandle, the portion of Florida that sticks out westward along the Gulf of Mexico south of Georgia and Alabama. The Escambia, Yellow and Apalachicola rivers all include forested sections that regularly flood, creating the Ivory-billed's preferred habitat. But Mennill and Hill both pleaded with birders to avoid their main research area, a 1,500-hectare swath along the Choctawhatchee River, north of the panhandle town of Bruce. The exact location is being kept secret by agreement with a state water agency that owns much of the area. Especially worrisome would be an invasion of so-called "twitchers," sometimes fanatical birders armed with high-power spotting scopes who play back recordings to entice rare birds to appear. "These birds could be driven out of the area if we attracted that kind of birder. We're pleading with them to put conservation first," said Mennill. Hill emphasized that seeking birds in the Choctawhatchee basin is not for the faint-hearted. Even when the weather is too cold for the resident alligators and aggressive water moccasins, rudimentary river landings and the lack of any trails make penetrating the area a challenge. "I think birders will come to say that they were in the Choctawhatchee and for the social event of sitting around with other birders. But once they get a taste of what it's like to get into the forest, they'll decide it's too hard," he said. More details at http://www.uwindsor.ca/ivorybill
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More evidence of ivory-bill bird found in Florida 09/26/2006 Huntsville Times Kenneth Kesner		Return to Top
AU researchers say they've seen and heard woodpecker A team led by an Auburn University professor announced Monday there is evidence indicating ivory-billed woodpeckers are living in a remote river basin in the Florida Panhandle. Bobby Harrison, who, with a colleague, made the first "confirmed" sighting of the thought-to-be-extinct bird in Arkansas in 2004, said he was pleased. "I think it's wonderful," said Harrison, a wildlife photographer and instructor at Oakwood College. "We've got birds in two locations now." Professor Geoff Hill, an ornithologist in Auburn's College of Science and Mathematics, and two research assistants, Tyler Hicks and Brian Rolek, were kayaking a section of the Choctawhatchee River in May 2005, when Rolek saw an ivory-bill in flight, according to the team's news release. On that same trip, Hill heard the bird's signature "double knock" sound and the team found numerous large cavities in trees, along with places where bark had been removed in a way consistent with known ivory-billed woodpecker behavior. In later visits, Hicks got a clear view of the bird; from May 2005 to May 2006, the team has made 14 sightings. And Dan Merrill, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor (Ontario), has recorded and identified hundreds of sounds that match descriptions of those made by the ivory-billed woodpecker. "It was just to be a weekend outing looking for potential habitat," Hill said. "We really never dreamed we'd actually find an ivory-bill." Hill published his findings Monday in the online journal Avian Conservation & Ecology (www.ace-eco.org), but rumors have been circulating in the birding community for some time. Harrison telephoned Hill last week to hear more about the team's work "and tell him I was very excited they had found birds there." He said Hill invited him to join the hunt in Florida and said the 2004 discovery in Arkansas had spurred his work along the Choctawhatchee River. Harrison and Tim Gallagher, a fellow photographer and editor of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, made the first "confirmed" sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in more than 60 years in an eastern Arkansas swamp in February 2004. The large black-and-white bird - up to 20 inches tall from head to toe with up to a three-foot wingspan - is one of a half-dozen North American bird species thought to have become extinct since 1880. It ranged across the southeastern United States until logging between 1880 and the 1940s eliminated many forests. While he hasn't personally seen or heard Hill's evidence, Harrison said he's talked to others he respects who have, and it's encouraging. "The people doing the sighting are good birders," Harrison said. He expects to join in the Florida search, in part because his chance of getting a good picture of the woodpecker is better in the 8,700-acre Choctawhatchee River habitat than the half-million acres of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge area in Arkansas. "Habitat has been improving for decades and good sightings have become more and more numerous," he said. "Perhaps, we will soon have a third and fourth find of this extraordinary creature as well." In his statement, Hill said they were confident the elusive bird is living in the Florida Panhandle, but acknowledged "the only evidence that would constitute irrefutable proof is a clear photograph or video of an ivory-billed woodpecker, and such an image has to date eluded us." Harrison said some doubters won't believe the bird still exists until they actually hold a dead one in their hands.
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Birders excited about woodpecker sightings 09/26/2006 Press-Register Bill Finch, environment editor		Return to Top
Auburn University researchers published evidence today of what some are describing as an ivory-bill woodpecker "Shangri-La" in the Florida Panhandle, a couple of hours east of Mobile. Researchers said they've had 13 sightings of the ivory bill, long thought to be extinct, and have recorded some 300 distinctive calls and sounds associated with the giant woodpecker, the largest in the United States and a virtual Holy Grail for many birders. The last clear photographs of the bird -- and uncontested proof of its existence -- date to the mid-1930s in Louisiana. In a paper to be published today in the online journal Avian Conservation & Ecology, the researchers also will provide evidence of some 20 roost cavities in the Choctawhatchee River basin north of Panama City, Fla., and distinctive foraging techniques they believe to be unique to ivory bills. The researchers acknowledged that the evidence is not conclusive and did not release any photographs. But even some skeptics of previous ivory-bill claims have described the evidence as exciting and compelling. The announcement comes as increasing controversy clouds what some believe was the rediscovery of the ivory bill in Arkansas in 2005, based largely on a few seconds of grainy, poorly focused video. After two years of searching the Caddo River basin in that state, a diverse team of scientists had been unable to confirm that the video actually shows the ivory bill. "We've got bad video," the Auburn team's lead researcher, Geoff Hill, said of footage his team shot in Florida. "We decided bad video is worse than no video, and it distracts from what is our good evidence." Known as stickler Because the Auburn team was unable to produce clear photos, the veracity of the Florida sightings may hinge, in the short term, on Hill's reputation. "Geoff is a stickler for the truth," said Bob Sargent, an influential amateur Alabama birder whose work on hummingbirds has pitched him into the ranks of the nation's top ornithologists. "If he said he saw the bird, damned if I wouldn't believe him." Sargent said Hill "knows the stigma attached" if he gets it wrong. Hill is considered one of the world's pre-eminent authorities on bird evolution and coloration, and unlike the researchers in Arkansas, the Auburn team has been careful not to claim it has definitive proof of the bird's existence. "The ivory bill is alive in the swamp forest," Hill said in an interview with the Press-Register last week, adding that he had personally gotten a clear, unmistakable view of the birds twice. "As an ornithologist, I'm convinced. But a sight record is not proof of these birds, and I don't expect my fellow ornithologists to be immediately convinced." Instead of photographs, Hill and the Auburn team have assembled other lines of evidence -- audio recordings of about 200 calls with a distinctive sound, often described as a "kent," and 100 double raps; roost cavities that Hill said are much larger than cavities made by other Southern birds he's analyzed; and an unusual pattern of bark removal, which Hill and his colleagues believe is most likely produced by the ivory bill's large beak and powerful chiseling. The combination of these features in one location, along with the sight observations by Hill and the other researchers, has raised cautious optimism among scientists who expressed concerns that the Arkansas announcement was -- at best -- premature. "Among the promising evidence are recordings of 'kent' vocalizations, apparently being given by two birds in response to one another, and double raps recorded in conjunction with vocalizations," wrote Jerome A. Jackson, a renowned ornithologist and professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University, in a recently released statement. "The researchers have presented this evidence with an appropriate note of caution, but let's keep the hope alive that Hill and his colleagues may have quietly found an ivory-bill Shangri-La along the Choctawhatchee." Surprising site Almost as surprising as the evidence of the birds themselves is the place where Auburn researchers believe they've found them. Hill said they all but blundered onto the Choctawhatchee River Basin in May 2005, a month after the national media celebration of the Arkansas find. Hill said his students were anxious to go looking for the birds in Arkansas, but he suggested they'd find more useful work looking closer to home. Hill said he initially focused on the Choctawhatchee River system when he recalled a 10-year-old phone call from Geneva County in southeast Alabama. He said the caller offered intriguing details indicating that an ivory bill had been sighted along the Pea River, the upper branch of the Choctawhatchee. Students found other old anecdotes of ivory bills farther south in the basin. Hill and a small team of graduate students loaded up kayaks, but quickly discovered that the forests along the Pea in Alabama were so degraded by logging and agriculture that they no longer seemed capable of supporting the birds, which foraged only in very old, mature forests. The forests along the river in the Florida Panhandle looked immediately promising, with stands of large cypress, some of them 6 feet in diameter, and just as important, broad, relatively undisturbed, stands of bottomland oaks, hickories, sweet gums and pines. Within an hour of launching their boats, they heard the distinctive "double rap" knocks produced when ivory bills scale bark off trees in search of insects. Graduate student Brian Rolek saw the bird a moment later, and the team shortly found numerous roosting cavities and scaled bark nearby. The small team of Auburn researchers saw more birds, roosting cavities and scaled bark on more carefully planned return trips to the swamp in the winter of 2005 and spring and early summer of this year. The identification of the birds as ivory bills was aided in part because many sightings were of females. Female ivory bills are the only large woodpeckers with a black crest -- or top-knot -- on their heads. Male ivory bills have a bright red crest similar to the male and female crests of the smaller, and still quite common, pileated woodpecker. While the team made numerous sightings of pairs of birds, Hill said they have not yet been able to confirm a sighting of a male ivory bill. The area where the birds were seen is reminiscent of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta north of Mobile Bay, with a confusing network of interlacing streams and broad forests that typically stand in several feet of water during the flood season in spring. The floodplain of the Choctawhatchee is not nearly so broad or deep as the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, but much of the Delta's oak and hickory bottomlands have been heavily and repeatedly logged. Hardwood evidence While the roosting cavities of the ivory bills were found almost exclusively in the lowest, wettest cypress forests, evidence of the birds' foraging was almost entirely restricted to the bottomland hardwood stands. Two species of tree -- sweet gums and spruce pines -- seemed to be providing the bulk of the ivory bills' food in the form of fat beetles that invade dying or recently dead trees. Hill noted that there had been some logging in the Choctawhatchee basin but that large, mature sweet gums and spruce pines were still in abundance. Neither of those species is considered a prime lumber tree. Fortunately, Geoff said, much of the land where the birds have been found is owned by the state of Florida and will likely remain protected from logging practices that would destroy the habitat. Much of the land that's in private hands, he said, is owned by people who value the land more for hunting and fishing than for logging. And while the prospective ivory bill habitat in Arkansas is surrounded by fields of soybeans, which offer no foraging opportunities for the birds, the bottomlands of the Choctawhatchee are surrounded primarily by forests of plantation pine, Hill observed. He said he welcomed even amateur birders to the Florida habitat: "We want a picture to come out of that river basin," he said. But he's not providing detailed directions to the area, and the broadest bottomlands are strung out over a couple of hundred square miles of river. "This is not a birder-friendly area," he warns. "It's kind of a rough place." He said he's worried that the inexperienced could risk their lives in the cold, fast floodwaters this winter. Hill was not optimistic about finding the birds on the river north of the Alabama border. "The forest changes at the border," he said. "Florida got this land, they preserved it, but Alabama has a terrible history of land use, and the habitats in Alabama are much degraded compared to Florida. "Tomorrow we could change that attitude. Trees could grow and mature. We could create habitat in Alabama and have reasonable expectation of drawing ivory bills."
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Video iPods part of AUs MBA tuition 09/26/2006 Montgomery Advertiser Bob Lowrey		Return to Top
AUBURN -- Videotapes and DVDs are old school. At least that was the view of Daniel Gropper when he decided to hand out top-of-the-line Apple iPods to students enrolled in Auburn University's off-campus MBA programs. The associate dean and director of the College of Business' MBA programs said the video iPods, which came loaded with business basics such as accounting, economics, finance and marketing, were given to students in the executive MBA and physicians MBA programs. Those 21-month programs are for senior employees at major corporations and physicians who want to better manage their practices. They do most of their studies at home, except for a brief campus residency and a 10-day trip abroad to study in Asia or Europe. Gropper said the video iPods were included in the $42,840 tuition for the executive program and $49,875 for the physicians program. "These (iPods) were just rolled out this summer," Gropper said. "We wanted a cutting-edge way of getting all of these students up to speed on the basics of MBA coursework. "A lot of these people haven't had any of these business courses for eight or 10 years. They're also useful in refreshing many of the physicians that have never had the basics of marketing or economics. It provides a mini-refresher course." The iPods were programmed so that the students could hook them up to their computers for a full-screen image or listen to course material while they commute to work or are on a cross-country flight. The off-campus MBA program began with VHS videos that were mailed, then switched to DVDs before going to Apple's iconic iPod. "We put it all on iPods," Gropper said. "That's the transition we've made this time." Cecelia Brannon, 32, of Auburn, who is director of rehabilitation services at the Longterm Hospital at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, said she is "100 percent sold on the iPod." "When I first got it, I didn't even know how to turn it on," she said. "I was in the Dark Ages, and I thought I was hip. But it's easy to work. I can bring it to work and do my work on my lunch hour, and driving back and forth, I can put my headset on. At home, I can hook it up to my computer." Brannon, who got her undergraduate degree from Auburn in health promotion and a master's degree in physical therapy from the Medical College of Georgia, said she enrolled in the executive MBA program at Auburn in hopes that it will broaden her skills in business and enable her to move up the corporate ladder. John Jahera, a professor of finance who teaches MBA students, says the portability of the iPod is perfect for executives who do a lot of traveling. "We have so many executives that are on the road constantly and they need the flexibility to receive this material," he said. "This is another mechanism to deliver the material." Twenty executives in the program are from such companies as Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems Inc., Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Johnson Controls Inc., Kohler Co., and Pratt & Whitney. In the physicians programs, 17 doctors from several specialties are enrolled from the Cornell and Georgetown medical schools and private physicians from the east and West Coast, Gropper said.
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