Audubon Hopeful That Evidence of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers in Florida Will Lead to Confirmation

Audubon Press Release

National Audubon Society today joins other conservationists around the globe in hoping that evidence compiled in the Florida panhandle will lead to the confirmation of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker population.

The sightings have been reported by an Auburn University research team, led by Professor Geoff Hill, Ph.D.

"It would be wonderful to confirm that a viable population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers exists, and we hope the search by the Auburn research team will lead to that," says Greg Butcher, Director of Bird Conservation for the National Audubon Society. "This announcement is a reminder of why it is so essential that we protect bottomland forests, wetlands and coastal habitats across the Southeast, and these new sightings should reinvigorate efforts to find the bird in other portions of its historic range."

The evidence was published today in Avian Conservation and Ecology (http://www.ace-eco.org/).

Recent sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas were announced in 2005 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Arkansas Department of Fish and Game. The National Audubon Society and its state field office in Arkansas assisted in the search to confirm the bird's existence, hiring a Volunteer Coordinator who supervised and trained volunteers to search for the bird, use equipment, and collect data. While search efforts in the Big Woods of Arkansas concluded without definitive visual documentation of the bird, it did reveal the critical importance of the preservation and protection of the floodplain forests of the Southeast, which are vital habitat for many bird species.

Prior to the 2005 announcement, the last accepted sightings of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker were in Cuba in 1987 and 1988, and the last fully documented United States sighting occurred in Louisiana in 1944. The last report of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Audubon's Christmas Bird Count (CBC) database were two birds that were seen in the Singer Tract in Louisiana during the 38th CBC in 1937. Other sightings were reported earlier in the 1930s.

A large, approximately 20-inch bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is dependent on old-growth forests of very large trees, such as cypress, for its habitat. Destruction and fragmentation of virgin bottomland forests throughout the southern United States, including floodplain forests along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, led to its decline and eventually to its believed extinction.

To learn more about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, go to http://www.audubon.org/bird/ivory/challenges.php.