Woodpecker feared extinct sighted

The ivory-billed woodpecker, long feared extinct, has been seen in a remote part of Arkansas 60 years after the last confirmed US sighting, ...

The ivory-billed woodpecker, long feared extinct, has been seen in a remote part of Arkansas 60 years after the last confirmed US sighting, ornithologists said on Thursday.

Several experts have spotted and heard an ivory-billed woodpecker in a protected forest in eastern Arkansas near the last reliable sighting of the bird in 1944, and one was captured on video last year.

‘‘The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), long suspected to be extinct, has been rediscovered in the ‘Big Woods’ region of eastern Arkansas,’’ researchers wrote in the journal Science.

Story continues below this ad

Drumming sounds made by the birds have also been heard, the researchers said.

‘‘This is huge. Just huge,’’ said Frank Gill, senior ornithologist at the Audubon Society. ‘‘It is kind of like finding Elvis.’’

Gill said there is little doubt the sightings are genuine. One male was videotaped from a boat in 2004.

‘‘The ivory-billed woodpecker is one of six North American bird species suspected or known to have gone extinct since 1880,’’ wrote the researchers, led by John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology in New York.

Story continues below this ad

A large, dramatic-looking bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker was known to be shy and to prefer the deep woods of the US Southeast.

It was sometimes nicknamed the ‘Lord, God bird’, Fitzpatrick told reporters in a telephone briefing. ‘‘It is such a striking bird. When people would see it they would say, ‘Lord, God what a woodpecker.’ That’s where it came from,’’ he said. —Reuters