(NYT) (extinct) Ivory-Billed Woodpecker ID is Disputed . . .

[TaleWgnDg]

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Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Identification Is Disputed

by JAMES GORMAN, New York Times, Published March 16, 2006

David A. Sibley, one of the country's top bird experts, said today that the woodpecker that appears fleetingly in a blurry videotape taken in an Arkansas swamp, in a discovery that electrified the world of birding last year, was not an ivory-billed woodpecker after all.



photo: Associated Press
An artist rendering of the ivory-billed woodpecker,
as provided by the journal Science in 2005.

Instead, Mr. Sibley and three colleagues write in the journal Science, the bird is a common pileated woodpecker, and there is no conclusive evidence that the near-mythical ivory bill has escaped extinction.

The (blurry video-)tape was made on April 25, 2004, by M. David Luneau Jr., an electronics and computers professor at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Along with eyewitness sightings, it was the centerpiece of a spring 2005 paper in the same journal that sparked great public excitement, a commitment of $10 million in federal funds for ivory-bill conservation, and jubilation among conservationists and birders.

The majestic ivory bill, the largest woodpecker in the United States, had been a poignant example of extinction from the last confirmed American sighting in 1944 until the report of the rediscovery, when it quickly became a symbol of hope, embraced by birders and the public.

. . . more at . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/science/16cnd-bird.html
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(bold-faced type emphasis added by TaleWgnDg)

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