 Woodpecker Wars: Back on the Hunt for the "Lord God" Bird  by Andrew Kerr January 2007 (...this is the continuation from Part 1) Q - Great serendipity there! A - Quite a bit of serendipity working for me. I was one of the six people chosen for the search, and spent from about mid-January to mid-February every day going through the swamp. We combed it fairly well, there were some areas that were very difficult, virtually impossible to get into, but we covered ground very well in there. We didn't find any birds. We found some interesting tree workings that looked like the kind of stuff that Tanner described as ivorybill work, but we're still working on that, we still don't know if we can distinguish the works of pileated woodpeckers from the works of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Q - If birds are potentially nesting in those cavities, wouldn't there be some sort of genetic material in there that might prove the existence of the bird? A - The "some sort of genetic material" is the hard part. People ask us how many cavities have we actually climbed up into and checked, and I don't know the answer to that, but it's not many. There's a lot of energy involved in undertaking something like that. I put out remote cameras [to monitor potential cavities]. [Unlike people,] the camera can stay out there till after dark and not worry about finding its way back, the camera can be ready before dawn in the morning, and also, perhaps most importantly, the camera isn't intrusive in any way that might alter the bird's behavior. Originally all I had were motion detecting cameras. But you have to be pretty close for a motion detect to work, and these cavities are up to 70, 80 feet in the tree. So you need time-lapse as well. When we're doing cavities we set it to about a four second time-lapse, just right at dusk and right at dawn with an hour, hour and a half on either side, because that's when woodpeckers come and go. Q - I'd like to know more about the ties between your electrical engineering work and the ivorybill search. A - I deployed my first remote cameras in 2002 in Louisiana, two years before the Arkansas sighting. My sound recording system used a 10-hour VHS tape because it was the longest-recording medium I could find at the time. So adding a webcam to the system was a simple task. We deployed it on a cavity that appeared to be freshly under construction, but the cavity-making effort apparently had already been abandoned, as we got no birds in the video. I worked with Richard Hines, biologist at the White River National Wildlife Refuge (WRNWR), in 2003 to get a motion-detecting camera deployed on a tree that had active scaling. We were in the early learning stages of using remote cameras to detect birds, and apparently missed whatever bird returned to the tree. In early 2004 I was investigating remote camera technology and seeking funding for a camera or two for use in the WRNWR when I was contacted about the Arkansas ivory-bill sightings. I convinced Scott Simon, The Nature Conservancy's Arkansas state director, that we should employ remote motion-detecting cameras in the search effort. Within three weeks, I had eight cameras in hand, and I began deploying them in the field after testing them on birds in my backyard. [I have written an article on remote cameras that is due to be published in an upcoming edition of Birding magazine. It will be in the March/April edition.] My master's degree from Georgia Tech had a strong emphasis in digital signal processing, which was a relatively new field in 1981. Today I use digital signal processing software for both audio and video analysis. The software and techniques for analyzing digital signals has come a long way in 26 years, and keeping up with the technology is a continuous learning experience. Q - You're likely to go down in ivorybill lore as the guy who shot that videotape. I know you've had to describe this—sort of like David Kulivan—over and over, but what was that experience like once again? A - My brother in law, Robert Henderson, and I had gone out that morning. We'd been out all day long, the video was about 3:40 in the afternoon. I had eight remote cameras out that we were checking in one general area which we loosely referred to as the "hot zone," where there had been probably about half a dozen sightings. In the video we were coming up to our eighth and final camera. We were motoring upstream in our canoe. I had put a little trolling motor on the canoe so we could move about quietly without splashing paddles and having to have both hands on a paddle and all that. With a trolling motor you can have one hand free while you're guiding the motor. I commented that I saw the camera out there. Then we were rounding this bend in the stream and I had just cut the trolling motor off and raised it up. I reached over to grab a paddle and when I grabbed the paddle with both hands and looked back I saw the woodpecker flying. I had my camera running, I left it running all the time because, like I said, we had had about half a dozen sightings at this point but no one had gotten a picture yet. A couple of people had gotten binoculars on it and my comments on our weekly conference calls were, "Why are you putting binoculars on it? We don't need to see it again, we need a picture of it!" I figured if you had time to raise binoculars you had time to raise the camera, so I left mine running all the time so that if I did see one I was just planning to raise the camera and point it. It would already be running, recording. Well, that was the plan. But it didn't happen that way because I had just picked up a paddle. By the time I would have set the paddle down and grabbed the camera it would have been out of sight because it was already flying. So we just watched it. It was flying directly away from me, and I still distinctly remember my thought as it was flying away: "Turn, turn." Because flying straight away I could see flashes of black and white, but I was just looking right up the tailpipe, so to speak, and I couldn't see whether that white was trailing or leading, and that's the key when the bird is in flight. The white on the ivorybill is on the trailing edge of the wing, the white on the pileated is on the leading edge and mostly just on the underside. It didn't turn, it flew straight away from us. As it got way out in the woods it veered left a little, but not enough to do us any good on seeing white, and Robert who had already turned and was looking into the woods, he said he saw red on the head when it took off. So we know it was a male, but neither one of us got what we thought was a diagnostic look at it. We knew it was one of the large black and white woodpeckers, but we couldn't be certain which one it was, so we just said let's just be quiet and listen for a little bit because very often, in fact most of the time when a pileated flies, it either calls when it's flying or it lands and calls.  We didn't hear anything, we waited a couple minutes I guess, and then I looked down at the video camera and said, “Well maybe we got it on video.” So I rewound the tape a little bit and played it forward and I could see on my little two inch screen a little dot of white in the video. I said, "Ah! We've got something!"So we went ahead and let the tape play forward a little bit so it was well beyond anything that would have been of any importance, and we just put it back on record, went about our business, checked our last camera, and went on in. We were probably out by 5 o'clock that evening. I remember talking about it on the way home and thinking, "Well we'll just connect this to your TV when we get home." We thought on a big TV we would be able to see enough to determine whether we could make a diagnosis or not. Well we looked at it on the TV and all we could see was flashes of white as this bird flew away. And that's when we realized it was pretty blurry. I took it home and watched it on a computer. I said, let me back this up a little bit, because who knows, we got lucky enough to flush this bird, maybe as we're coming upstream and talking the bird flew right in behind us and we didn't even see it. And that's when I found the little bird on the tree, when I backed the tape up about 30 seconds before the flight. So I started looking at that going "Hey! What is that? Look! It's right in the right area!" And we looked at that over and over again. In fact most of the people [involved in the search] I showed that to were, at first, "There's not much there, that's just a little dot," and so forth. But the more we studied it and looked at it the more people eventually said, "You know, that may be the most diagnostic part of the whole video, because when the bird is perched on the side of the tree, it's unambiguous what side of the bird you're looking at. And the difference between the two species is very distinctive when it's perched, so if that's a bird, and that's what you have to get beyond, is is that really a bird on the side of that tree or not, but if it is, it's colored like an ivory-billed and not a thing like a pileated. Q - In looking at the video, that huge patch of white seems inarguable [Skeptics would disagree; some argue that a pileated with a raised wing on the side of the tree might create a similar expanse of white; some others argue that the perched bird is actually flying, and so we are seeing the underside of a pileated's wing. Cornell's retort to those theories can be found here—ed]. A - And that's where I've been all along, that to me the strongest piece of evidence, that there is no frame in there that says, "Oh, maybe those other frames were deceptive but here's one that clearly shows it to be a pileated." And in every other pileated video we've gotten, and we studied many dozens of pileated videos, there'll be a frame here or there where you see a huge amount of white, but the very next frame you see this big black trailing edge. We call it a trailing edge, but really the back half of the pileated's wing is black, so you've got to argue that through motion blur and white bleed that somehow the white in the wings disguises the other half of the wings. Once in a while if you get the wing feathers tilting just right and the motion just right, you can hide that trailing black half. But you cannot do it consistently. We have not found any video of a flying pileated woodpecker where the black consistently disappears. It'll just be like one out of 20 or 30 or 50 frames where you might get deceived, but in the very next frame you get clear distinctive pileated marks. So to me the strongest evidence is that there are no bad frames in the entire video that look like a pileated. Q - What was the mood like in the meeting where you decided to go public with your data? And where did you stand in terms of whether or not it was the right time to disclose the information? Did you think it was time to go forward, or were you reluctant? A - We had had an hour to two-hour conference call every Tuesday night for a year. So we, and I say we—that's some folks at Cornell, some folks at the Nature Conservancy here in Arkansas, and myself, and Gene Sparling, and a few other people that were not associated with Cornell or the Nature Conservancy (Cornell and the Nature Conservancy headed it up, Scott Simon and John Fitzpatrick were our elected leaders of our effort and the rest of us basically had equal voice in what happened). We at some point, probably late summer or early fall of 2004, decided to do a search that winter and announce sometime in the spring, because we wanted a full search season. We knew we weren't going to be able to keep it a secret forever because we had already had little leaks here and there. We'd have to bring 'em in, that's the only way to plug the leak is to bring 'em in, and tell 'em how important it is not to spread it— Q - Or kill them! A - [Laughs.] —or kill them, and that's still against the law in most states in this country! And most of them were pretty good birders, and we didn't want to kill off all the good birders! Somewhere in the fall, and it may have been even in the winter, we picked a date that we were going to make the announcement in the spring. And we also started, probably January or February, working on an article, because we said that before we can go forward and make this official we needed scientific evidence, and we needed to write a scientific paper. And we knew we had to let the agencies know. So at that meeting [with Fish and Wildlife] we showed them everything we had. It was fun. It was an exciting meeting because there were people in there who had heard bits and pieces of the story, but none of them other than those of us on the inside had heard the whole story. None of them had seen the video. They probably for the most part didn't know the video existed. They came away from that meeting knowing that they had some serious work ahead of them, because it becomes their issue to deal with, because it's an endangered species, so it falls under Fish and Wildlife. A lot of this work was being done on Fish and Wildlife property and National Wildlife Refuges, some of it was being done on Game and Fish Commission land, some of it was on private land, some of it was on Nature Conservancy and Arkansas Natural Heritage land. So we had a lot of agencies and non profits involved, so it was a very coordinated effort putting all those together. Q - What if the bird had been officially considered extinct by Fish and Wildlife before your announcement? Would that have complicated efforts to protect it upon the announcement of its rediscovery? Would Congress have had to have officially brought it back from the dead before measures could be taken to protect it? A - I'm sure it would be quite different, because this bird was never delisted, so automatically various laws kicked into effect, and certain things had to be done, Fish and Wildlife had to follow those rules for what you do with endangered species. For example, forming the species recovery team. Every endangered species is supposed to have a species recovery team. I guess the ivorybill didn't because there was perhaps nothing to do if you don't know there are any around, but once we knew one was around they had to form a species recovery team. Q - Considering the importance of the videotape as evidence to outsiders, did you feel any pressure with regards to releasing it? Were you worried about public reaction to the tape? A - No, not really. NPR came in and I remember [science correspondent] Chris Joyce asking me, "So was this the moment you knew that the ivorybill was not extinct, when you shot this video?" I said, "No." We already thought it was not extinct because at this point we had already had half a dozen sightings from some very reliable people; good sightings with good field marks. But this video happens to be the only tangible piece of evidence that we have that we can show to other people. I can tell you I saw something and you can choose to believe me or not, and the better you know me the better your decision would be about whether to believe me or not. But if you have something like a picture or video or sound recording or whatever that others can look at, then others are able to make up their minds based on science rather than on their feelings on how much they believe somebody. Q - I think it's ironic, though, that the tape could have actually harmed the overall argument that ivorybills were alive. Once David Sibley [perhaps the leading voice of the "skeptics" movement] latched onto the tape, that might have distracted from the more important evidence, which was that experienced ornithologists had seen and positively identified the bird on multiple occasions. All the focus on the tape drowned out that other evidence. A - Joe Neal who coauthored with Douglas James Arkansas Birds in the '80s made a point that virtually everything in the world of ornithology is based on human sightings. That's how ornithology records are produced. He said, "When we did Arkansas Birds we had something like 40,000 sight records, and very very few photographs as evidence of these birds." So he said that independent of whether there is a video or not, you have credible people who have seen this bird and seen multiple field marks and written up field reports, and that's just the way ornithology works. So he's not happy with the people who say, "We don't think the video is of an ivorybill, so therefore ivorybills don't exist." Even if you throw out the video you still have all those sightings, and how do you deal with all those? Do you say they're all crazy? And if you do, you're talking about some otherwise very competent birders. Q - I guess there is a fear though that now that the cat is out of the bag a lot of nutjobs might be reporting ivorybill sightings. A - Oh yeah, and we knew that was going to happen. In fact as soon as the announcement was made people came out of the woodwork saying, "Yeah we saw one a couple years ago," "My grandaddy saw one." If you just sat down and thought about the kind of stories we'd get, we got 'em. And I think that's totally to be expected. Q - How do you separate the crazies from the sane? A - It's very very difficult, because you have non-birders, and you can't disqualify their sightings just because they're not birders. I've had people call me up and give pretty good descriptions of an ivorybill, and I'll say, how do you know it wasn't a pileated, and they'll tell me they've never seen a pileated. So what do you do with that? Certainly your first thought is OK, non birder, non-detail-oriented and all that. But you go back to what they told you, and there's a few things in there that they tell you, like it had a big white shield on it, it looks like it was wearing a tuxedo with the shirt tail hanging out, and you're going, "Oh my gosh, a bird that looks like it's wearing a tuxedo with tails, that's a pretty darn good description of an ivorybill perched against a tree!" Q - It's an odd instance of how inexperience can actually lend credibility to a report. A - Because they don't have the preconceived notions of what it's supposed to look like. Q - Everything I've read about the search over the last few months has said that this year's search for the bird has been "scaled back" from previous ones. What does that mean? A - Certainly the paid staff is scaled back. I think the volunteer crews are going to be about the same but it's scaled back here in Arkansas and it's spread out more. There's a traveling team this year, Martjan Lammertink is heading up the traveling team. They're going to hit Florida at some point and a couple of areas in South Carolina. We're trying to finish up the areas in Arkansas that weren't covered in the first two search seasons, because in the first search season we concentrated heavily in the area where the sightings had been. We took half the team there, and the other half of the team went down to the White River Refuge, which is a much larger, more remote area, the thought being when you look at a map, if you had to find some population of ivorybills, we thought the likelihood would be that it would be down in the White River Refuge where there's a lot more woods. After two seasons I think we've still only carefully covered about a third of what we call the Big Woods, so we're going to try to cover areas that we haven't covered in the past two years with volunteer crews. But also, when there are good sightings, we'll immediate break away and move into the area where there were sightings and strike while the iron's hot. Q - When are you heading out there yourself? A - I'm the camera guy, so I try to go out once a week. With my full time teaching schedule, Friday's the only day I don't have class, so on Fridays I typically head out. The full-time crew is going to be deploying cameras for me when they find cavities, and then I will just swap out the cards and bring them back here and do all the picture review during the week. Each two gigabyte card will hold roughly 30,000 pictures, and so the card fills up in 10 days or so. In a week or two I have about 30,000 pictures to look at from each camera. So that takes up all my spare time here, back at the office. Q - Your wife wrote a children's book. She seems to be very active in the schools. Is she a teacher? A - No, she's a CPA! But she's always liked to write; she actually majored in accounting but she had a minor in journalism. She was a high school newspaper editor and a college newspaper editor. She liked to write poetry or stories or whatever just for fun and never published anything. During this year period where we were searching quietly and secretly, she started writing a poem about the woodpecker and the search for the woodpecker based on all the stories she would hear us tell when we came back. Everything in that book happened, or is based on something that happened, to her when she went out there with me, or to me, or somebody else in our group. She let me read it, and I thought "Oh, this is good!" And for once we felt like we had an opportunity to publish something that had a niche market. The timing was there, the story was there, it was an interesting story, it was a good story to get children involved. She also works with children at church, she always does the Christmas play, so she likes working with kids, talking with kids, and teaching kids, even though she's not a teacher. We debated how we could publish this. We couldn't go to anybody because it was still a secret. So that's why we self-published. We thought about putting pictures in there, photographs. But it turns out the only good photographs I had were all of snakes, because they're easy to photograph; snakes just lie there. So I got hundreds of pictures of snakes. Which doesn't make for a very good children's book unless you're just writing about snakes! So we decided to get an artist. Most of the artists we talked to wanted a year’s notice. And we hadn't started until March or so, so we knew we only had about a month or two to make things happen. She asked my daughter, my daughter was a junior in college at the time, "What about that guy who used to draw on you?" Kids are always drawing on each other; she used to come home with some really nice art drawn on her! [Laughs.] And she said, "That's Trevor, he's at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, (which is where I teach), he's an art student there." So we contacted Trevor and said, "Hey, do you want to do some work?" He said, "Yeah." So we said, "Well, here's the deal, you can't tell anybody—not even your mother—what the subject is, and we need these 16 drawings done in 16 days." So he did the sixteen paintings that are in that book in sixteen days, met the deadline we gave him while going to school and working. Yeah, he's a good worker. We were very worried about approaching a printer to do it, but it turns out just about the time we were going to have to tell the printer what we had, the story leaked, and we made the announcement. We actually announced three weeks earlier than we had planned. The announcement was planned for May 18, which was our 25th wedding anniversary! We got the book out about May 18 which was when we had scheduled it for. Q - I read an article in Audubon magazine back in the 1980's about ivory-billed woodpeckers. One of the things that came through from that, and I think has been a continuing story since then, is the level of paranoia associated with the bird. For example, the paranoia of southern landowners that fear that if the bird were to be rediscovered on their property, the Feds would come in and sieze that land. A - I've heard that quite a bit. I heard that when we were down in Louisiana. I've heard that to some extent here in Arkansas, but we certainly try to dispel that myth. But if someone believes that there's nothing much you can do to change their beliefs except just not do it. Q - And then there's the paranoia of those who see the bird and fear for their reputations, and their perceived sanity. A - For their reputations, yes, and some of them are paranoid about what might happen to the bird. So some people think it's just better to leave it alone and they don't want to tell anybody else. I don't know if I know anybody like that, but I've heard that thought process. Q - And finally, the necessity of you guys having to work in secrecy. Clearly, when you take it all into account, the ivorybill is a stick of dynamite, like no other species I've ever seen. A - It evokes some strong responses from people. You keep hearing it called "the Holy Grail of birding!" Web Resources |