Woodpecker Wars: Back on the Hunt for the "Lord God" Bird  by Andrew Kerr January 2007 In 2004, Dr. David Luneau, a Georgia Tech graduate and Professor of Electronics and Computers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, shot the most discussed, analyzed, and debated video in the history of ornithology (ornithology = the study of birds). A black and white smudge, only a few pixels high in his camera viewfinder, is the best evidence so far that one of the most magnificent birds on earth, the ivory-billed woodpecker, feared by many to have been extinct since the end of the 1940s, might still be alive in an Arkansas swamp. The bird's rediscovery, and the video that was released along with the announcement, made front page news around the world. That's because the ivorybill is regarded as a "Holy Grail" bird among birdwatchers—sometimes it's referred to as the "Lord God" bird, as in, "Lord God! What a bird!"—a bird so spectacular in appearance—and so spectacularly rare—that it has haunted the minds of countless birdwatchers ever since the last confirmed sightings of it were made. In the decades that fell between the 40's and today, a number of tantalizing ivorybill sightings were claimed, but accompanying objective evidence was usually lacking. So considering how much was on the line, it's little surprise that the video Luneau shot was picked over like Zapruder's film of the Kennedy assassination. Many ornithologists were convinced that the video showed an ivory-billed woodpecker. But others doubted that the film was conclusive. Passions flared and wars of words were waged in numerous technical science journals and blogs. As of today, each side has felt it has made its case, so fussing over the Luneau video is now a pointless endeavor. After literally every frame has been analyzed you either see an ivorybill or you don't. Both sides now hope that even better evidence will turn up, and during this 2006-2007 search season Luneau is back on the task of making that happen. In addition to addressing the controversy surrounding the video, discussing details of the hunt, and chatting about all sorts of other things woodpeckery, we also discussed Luneau's wife's book on ivorybills, possibly the first children's book that had to be created in secret, since the then ongoing investigation into the ivorybill's continued existence was also being conducted in secret while she wrote it. The following interview with Dr. David Luneau was conducted on January 3, 2007. Q - I actually wrote an article about ivory-billed woodpeckers back in 1989 when I was a teenager. Back then it was conventional wisdom that the bird was extinct in the United States. A - And I think in some ways that still is the conventional wisdom, at least among some people. That's part of the issue with all the skepticism; people have effectively declared this bird extinct even though it's not officially extinct. Fish and Wildlife has not declared it extinct. But those who have in their minds declared it extinct require a very stringent level of proof, probably more proof than most people would. Q - I suppose you read the recent National Geographic article on the ivorybill search (December 2006). What did you think of it? They seemed to go with this literary motif about skeptics, agnostics, and believers. A - That part right there probably bothered me more than anything: using the term "believers" for those of us who had done all the science and all the analysis. We did a lot of scientific analysis on the video, we had a lot of sightings, we put together a science paper, it was the cover story in the journal of Science, and yet we're called "believers." We consider ourselves very skeptical, and we were very skeptical from the beginning of the whole thing. We knew it required a certain level of proof and we feel like we provided that proof. The ones that [article author Mel White] called "skeptics," they're more the ones that should be classified on the belief scale, as "non-believers," because they really haven't offered any proof. What they're saying is that the video shows a normal pileated woodpecker [The pileated woodpecker is another large, black and white woodpecker with a red crest that is frequently confused with the ivorybill by amateurs.—ed] and yet with all the pileated woodpeckers out there they can't produce a video that shows all these characteristics that we see in the video that we say are not characteristic of pileated woodpeckers. Q - It seems there's an interestingly thin line between "skepticism" and, say, the rationale of scientific creationism, wherein one focuses more on rock-throwing. A - Obviously the null hypothesis in this video is that it's a pileated woodpecker. So we started with that: is this or is this not a pileated woodpecker? And every characteristic we kept seeing in this video, we couldn't make it into a pileated woodpecker. We published that in Science. And after some of the initial skeptic articles had been written we looked at their evidence, looked even closer at the video, and basically found more things in the video that convinced us that it was definitely not a pileated woodpecker. Q - One of the things that has come to my attention in recent years is that there really are still large, unexplored areas in the United States where birds like ivorybills could hide without detection for many years. A - "Unexplored" is probably too strong of a word, because most of these areas where we are now looking for ivorybills are historical hunting areas. Hunters go a lot of places birders don't go, they go deeper into the woods and spend many hours there sitting very quietly. So the sighting that started this new wave [of ivorybill sightings] was in 1999. [Then LSU student] David Kulivan was turkey hunting when he described seeing a pair of ivorybills. The hunters are out there in the deep woods in bigger numbers than birders. So I wouldn't say these areas are unexplored. To say they're unexplored by birders is probably a fair statement, but it's not like it's the remote regions of Borneo or anything like that. Q - I thought it was unfortunate in 1999 when David Kulivan reported his sighting, that, one, the school he was from, LSU, had a couple years earlier gained a reputation of a party school (a student died of binge drinking in 1997 around the same time LSU was picked as one of the top 10 party schools in a national magazine), and two, he reported that he had seen the birds on April Fool's Day. He was berated by skeptics. But in fact everyone who spoke to him said that he was extremely honest—a great witness. I felt very sorry for him. I hope he is now a lot happier, in large part due to your own work! A - I had met him when we were down in Louisiana in 2002. The night before the announcement [of the bird's rediscovery] I sent him an email letting him know that we were announcing it, because I knew people would start contacting him again to get his thoughts on it. I know at one point he just quit talking to the press. After a year or two of that you just get tired of it. There's no new information, and he essentially said, "I've said everything I know. I've given all my thoughts on this. It's been written in many, many places. I don't have anything new to add to it. Don't bother me anymore." Q - It must have been miserable for him. He knew what he saw, and so for him to be constantly hounded... A - And he had nothing else; no other sightings, no pictures, no videos, no anything to help back him up. It was just him, him and his word. My conversation with him...I'd heard all about it through [Dr. J.] Van Remsen at LSU and probably was predisposed a little bit to trusting the guy because everybody said he was very trustworthy. But he came across as very low key, didn't seem to have any agenda, didn't seem to have any reason to be making a story up, so no reason to doubt what he said he saw. Q - Is the region where Kulivan made his sighting still believed to perhaps harbor some ivorybills, or has it since been written off? A - It probably depends on who you ask. We searched it fairly well in 2002 during the Zeiss-sponsored Pearl River search. I think it's fairly clear there's not an active population of any sort there. Perhaps the ones he saw were wandering through. Q - [The last known population of ivorybills lived on the Singer Tract in Louisiana, so-named because the area was eventually bought up by the Singer Sewing Machine company—and logged. Those birds were studied in great detail by James Tanner and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology from 1937-1939.] How many ivorybills were there on the Singer Tract in those final days? I mean, I know they counted down to zero, but... A - When Tanner was there he studied six or seven pairs of the birds. During World War II they were clearing it—in fact they used German prisoners of war to help with the clearing. There was one last female that became the poster child for the possible extinction of the bird, and she was coming back to a roost tree, this one particular lone snag out in the middle of a clear cut area. Q - It's amazing to me that even when you factor in the enormous importance of the war effort that nobody could find a way to save that one tract of land somehow. A - Four southern governors petitioned, put up $200,000 to try and save the area, but in those days conservation was a nascent movement, and it was also up against World War II—and that's a pretty formidable opposition. Anything that was viewed as hindering the war effort was certainly viewed as unpatriotic, and those trees were needed for decking, for crates, for caskets and so forth. Q - You were an MS in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Were you always birdwatching on the side? A - As a kid we backyard birdwatched. I was always somewhat interested in birds. I wasn't a fanatical birdwatcher as a child. I got married between my undergraduate and graduate work, and we moved out to Atlanta, went to Georgia Tech, and as our first hobby together we took up birdwatching. Q - The bird was seen in Cuba in the 1980s, but is now probably extinct there. You were back in your homestate of Arkansas when Kulivan's sighting was announced. What was your reaction to that news? A - When the story of Kulivan's sighting broke, when I saw the email that quoted the article from The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, I just reached over to pick up the phone, called my brother and said, "When are we going?" Here it is, it's an eight hour drive, but that's way closer than Cuba, and this is perhaps the chance of a lifetime. So we found a weekend just a couple weeks later that we were both free and we headed to Louisiana and started looking there. We went twice in 2000 and then we planned a longer trip for a whole week in 2001. In late 2001 I applied for a sabbatical for the spring of 2002 for the purpose of tying this whole birding thing into my electrical engineering background. I came up with this idea of putting up sound recording devices to try and listen when people aren't out there. You have to make your hobbies look like part of your work! And what better tie between birding and electronics than to put out some sort of recording equipment? The day after I got approval for the sabbatical is when I saw the announcement for the Pearl River search sponsored by Zeiss. I said "Whoah! This is perfect!" Of course I applied for it because I was going to be going down there anyway, to the same area looking for the same bird, and here they were organizing a search for 30 days. I already had the whole semester off, so it was a natural fit. (Article continues...)