A visit to Arkansas as Ivory-billed Woodpecker faces historic listing decision

Extinction debate obscures just how much floodplain forest has been lost.

In early May, I spent a weekend with Arkansas birders, showing my film “Monty and Rose 2: The World of Monty and Rose” at Arkansas Audubon Society’s Spring Convention in Jonesboro. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was on my mind as soon as I was invited. The big Campephilus woodpecker—long thought extinct—reportedly was seen in the woods of eastern Arkansas in the early 2000s.

As we drove through southern Illinois, into Missouri’s Bootheel region, and finally Arkansas, the landscape widened into a vast expanse of alluvial floodplain along the Mississippi River. It was a topography I’d never experienced previously. There were no longer woods, though this area was once floodplain forest for millions of acres, stretching from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to Tennessee, Kentucky, and even Illinois. We’d finally see the woods south of Jonesboro, at the northern edge of the bayou cited in 2004 Ivory-billed reports.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker came up in casual conversation a couple times at the convention. The sense I had was that most attendees believed it still existed. These were some of the most avid birders in the state. I’m not sure what I expected, but I wouldn’t say people were overly excited about the proximity to possible Ivory-billeds—maybe it was just me who was most excited—but after all it’s been almost 20 years since the reports.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker discussion can be intense and acrimonious. The very online true believers have no doubt the big woodpeckers exist, and they’ll tell anyone who will listen (including me, as I’ve been a skeptic). The more cynical lot believes you could put a bunch of expert birders in a canoe for a few days—which basically happened in the early 2000s—and they’d already have come away with a crystal-clear picture of an Ivory-billed (or not).

But in talking to two of the original searchers for the bird, I didn’t perceive any ill-will. Even as the New York Times featured a new peer-reviewed study that suggests the Ivory-billed Woodpecker persists in a Louisiana swamp forest. And even as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) may be poised to declare the birds extinct, which would end legal protection.

Before the convention, I talked to David Luneau, a professor whose camcorder video from 2004, in the midst of Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s extensive searches, helped give credence to the idea that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker still exists.

“There’s not a benefit to de-listing,” said Luneau. “It’s not saving money, the conservation work is going on regardless. The Nature Conservancy and state organizations would not be impacted at all.” 

Allan Mueller was Ivory-billed Woodpecker Biologist at The Nature Conservancy in the early 2000s and is a retired field supervisor with USFWS.

“It doesn’t make much difference whether it’s listed or not listed,” Mueller said. “Right now, being listed does not have much effect on land management. People who manage the public lands are very responsible, there is good science behind their management. What they’re doing right now will help the Ivory-billed Woodpecker whether listed or not listed.” 

Some experts have been harsh in their assessment of the latest evidence of the woodpecker:

“The trouble is, it’s all very poor video,” said Chris Elphick, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Connecticut who studies birds. Pileated and red-headed woodpeckers, among other species, can look a lot like ivory-bills from a distance or from certain angles. Light can play games with the eye. Audio is easy to misconstrue.

“I don’t think this changes very much, frankly,” he said. “I would love to be wrong.”

Luneau began looking for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker around the time of the David Culivan sightings along the Pearl River around the turn of the century. Though Luneau grew up in Arkansas, he’d never been to search areas like the White River National Wildlife Refuge.

“It’s a remote refuge and isolated, you don’t go to it on the way to anything,” Luneau says. “It’s the cul-de-sac of Arkansas, between the White River and Mississippi River. There’s no way out unless you’re swimming or boating.”

Earl Buss Wildlife Management Area is in the far upstream reaches of Bayou DeView, where David Luneau’s famous 2004 video was recorded. Photo by Bob Dolgan.

Mueller says there’s a half-million acres of bottomland forest remaining in Arkansas. It’s a shadow of what once was but still a substantial area.

“The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is still in the areas we were searching,” he says. “I think not many of them, they’re very wary of humans. Just about the time we have a handle on them, they move. Maybe they run out of food sources, or there are not enough nesting trees and too much disturbance.”

The thought occurs to me that in all this controversy, maybe we’ve buried the lede. There was once 25 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest in the Mississippi Valley, including my home state of Illinois. And the majority of it has been lost to clear-cutting and farming.

“There was a lot of habitat there,” Mueller says. “How much was occupied by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, we don’t know. But we suspect a whole lot of it was.”

Maybe the conversation should be about restoring some of what’s been lost. While at the convention, I received a copy of Arkansas Audubon Society’s brand-new Field Reference to Arkansas Birds, a checklist that’s provided as a service by the society. It includes a listing of all 425 species seen in the state, as well as their frequency and status. It includes species like another endangered woodpecker—the Red-cockaded Woodpecker that exists in remnant pine stands. Indeed, Michael Retter of the American Birding Association proposed this very thing on NPR’s Science Friday on May 26. The extinction debate does have the benefit of resulting conservation.

“If we find a reliable population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, there will be money and attention for those birds,” says Mueller. “That’s not true of all endangered species, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is the exception because of its very high profile.”

And after a weekend in Arkansas, my conclusion is that most folks believe the woodpecker still does exist.  

Said Mueller, “Amongst the birding crowd, yes it is still out there.”

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