Yale, KU Researchers Affirm Ivory-billed Woodpecker

A team of ornithologists has confirmed the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker after reviewing three recordings of bird sounds made in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

Recordings provided Sunday to ornithologists at Yale University and the University of Kansas by John Fitzpatrick and colleagues at Cornell University caused the Yale and KU researchers to conclude that the ivory-billed woodpecker has been detected for the first time in decades.

The Cornell-led group earlier had published a paper in Science contending the woodpecker exists. A team comprising Yale, KU and Florida Gulf Coast ornithologists had been planning a rejoinder to that paper in a different journal until the team received the new evidence.

Cornell's Fitzpatrick told the New York Times, "We sent them the sounds. I wish we'd done that earlier."

Yale ornithologist Richard Prum said, "We were very skeptical of the first published reports and thought that the previous data were not sufficient to support this startling conclusion.

"But the thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct."

The unpublished recordings include a series of distinctive vocal calls and an exchange between woodpeckers of "double raps" that are produced by the bird's bill.

According to Mark Robbins, collections manager at the KU Natural History Museum, the double rap sound, along with the timing of an answering double rap from a second bird, confirms the identity of the birds as ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Robbins said, "The recordings of the double raps sound very natural, and they are totally consistent with the behavior of the Central and South American relatives of the ivory-billed woodpecker."

These recordings provide the first evidence of the existence of more than a lone ivory-billed woodpecker. Cornell researchers plan to release the recordings at an upcoming meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union at the end of August.

Prum and his colleagues had submitted a manuscript critical of the Cornell team's original report in Science to the journal PLoS Biology. They've now withdrawn the manuscript.

The authors had written in that paper that definitive evidence of the bird's existence was still necessary. They wrote, "We sincerely hope that this evidence is forthcoming soon."

Now it is, and Prum and Robbins say they are ecstatic.