http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050718/full/050718-10.html
Ivory-billed woodpecker under scrutiny
Rex Dalton
Published online: 21 July 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050718-10
A team of bird experts is questioning the reported discovery of an
ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that until recently was thought to
be extinct.
Conservationists and bird lovers were thrilled in April by a videotape,
reported in Science1, of what seemed to be an ivory-billed woodpecker
(Campephilus principalis) in Arkansas.
No sighting of the majestic species in the United States had been
confirmed since 1944; it disappeared as its dense forest habitat was
chopped down, making the bird a symbol of lost heritage.
Now a team of ornithologists, led by Richard Prum of Yale University,
Connecticut, plans to report a case of what it thinks is mistaken
identity. The bird described in Science, the experts say, is not an
ivory-billed woodpecker after all, but a non-endangered relative: a
pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus).
Questions asked
Prum's team includes a leading authority on ivory-billed woodpeckers,
Jerome Jackson of Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, who for
decades has been unable to document a sighting. "I have serious
questions about the Science report," he told Nature in May, before the
team began working on its own manuscript.
Prum and his colleagues scrutinized a video taken by a Cornell
University team in the forested swamps east of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Detailed studies of the bird's size and white markings suggest it could
be a pileated woodpecker rather than an ivory-billed, they say. The
Cornell team had considered this possibility and discounted it.
The crucial video includes a four-second section in which the bird
takes off from a tupelo tree in April 2004. Because the camera was
mounted on the front of a canoe, and set to a wide focus, the images
are frustratingly blurry.
No comment
Prum declines to discuss details of his manuscript until it is
published, in a PLoS journal. The third author of the paper is Mark
Robbins, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and
member of the American Birding Association's checklist committee, which
confirms species sightings.
John Fitzpatrick, the Cornell ornithologist who led the Science report,
and other co-authors also declined to comment. PLoS plans to publish a
response from the Cornell team, and a further rebuttal from Prum's
group. All three papers are expected to go online within a month.
The Science paper also included seven reported sightings by Cornell
team members between February 2004 and February 2005 around the Cache
River and White River national wildlife refuges. But visual
observations can be suspect, and they came amid thousands of observer
hours when no other sightings were made.
Watch the birdie
Prum's analysis may have significant implications for policy as well as
conservation biology. The Bush administration and congressional
Republicans are leading a charge to reduce species protections under
the US Endangered Species Act.
For more than 30 years this legislation has sheltered threatened plants
and animals, and infuriated some business and development interests.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is covered under the act.
In April, after the woodpecker's reported rediscovery, the US
departments of agriculture and the interior redirected about $10
million from other projects to conserve the ivory-billed's habitat. The
announcement also triggered a tourist boom for rural Arkansas, with
birding enthusiasts flocking to the area for a glimpse of the creature.
Fitzpatrick J., et al. Science, 308. 1460 - 1462 (2005).
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