Finding The 'Lord God Bird'

Ed Bradley Reports On The Rediscovery Of The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

(CBS) 
Both men say they knew immediately that they were looking at an ivory bill.

As soon as Fitzpatrick was told of the sighting, he mapped out a search and strictly limited information about it.

Why did he keep the find so quiet? “As I put it to the small group of people who had heard about the story, ‘If we just let this out right now, it's going to be Coney Island down there,’ " Fitzpatrick says.

He feared that announcing the discovery would attract bird watchers from all over. That is what happened last year, when birders flocked to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, to see a rare Red Footed Falcon, never before seen in America.

Bird watching has become an American phenomenon and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is the fastest growing recreational activity in the country.

According to the government, 50 million Americans are bird watchers. Thousands of people pack conventions and attend lectures on "birding."

Sales of bird watching paraphernalia are up — from cameras and binoculars to high tech digital field guides and books — making bird watching a multi-billion dollar industry, in part because of this bird.

The ivory-billed woodpecker was reportedly sighted in a federal wildlife refuge, 120 miles long in eastern Arkansas.

It’s one of the most exotic and the most inhospitable environments in America, a vast primordial ooze, a place so wild, that the Big Woods have been called this country’s Amazon.

The refuge is home to 265 different species of birds, nearly a third of all the species that live in the United States, and to a fantastic potpourri of wildlife, including cottonmouths, one of the deadliest snakes in America.

A few weeks after the initial sighting, field biologists were recruited to spend five months in the Big Woods searching for something. They weren’t told it was the ivory-billed woodpecker until they agreed to keep it secret.

Scott Simon heads the Arkansas branch of The Nature Conservancy, which has helped preserve the forest where the ivory-billed was sighted. The Conservancy’s job was to raise the money for the search without telling prospective donors what they were giving it for unless they also agreed to keep it secret.

“And that's the amazing part about this," Simon says. "I mean, a few people provided millions of dollars in private support for this, without even confirmation of the bird. Because, you know, they so much were enamored by the story of hope."

A systematic search of the swamp began in March 2004. Some of the biologists were assigned to deploy listening devices on two dozen trees throughout the forest, which would record for weeks at a time and were then sent to Cornell for analysis.

Other searchers played the 1935 recording of the ivory-bill’s call and then listened for an answer. They even put out decoys, trying to draw the bird out.

For months, searchers spent long hours in the swamp, waiting, watching and listening.

Last winter a crane was brought in to get a bird’s eye view from above the treetops. Every day up to 20 people went out, spending up to 14 hours in the swamp. Since they began a year and a half ago, searchers have spent 15,000 hours looking for the bird.

“I was right up the lake in an enclosed area, about a hundred, less than a hundred yards from right here, right by that one horizontal tree around the bend there,” says Tim Barksdale, one of the premier bird photographers in America.

He was hired to capture what would be the first pictures of an ivory-billed since 1935. Barksdale spent 241 days in the swamp without seeing the bird.

The only picture of the ivory-billed woodpecker researchers say they got was a lucky shot taken from a canoe, from a video camera that Arkansas University at Little Rock professor, David Luneau, and his brother-in-law, Robert Henderson, had rigged to run continuously. The bird's flight was visible for only four seconds.

“Well, there are people who looked at the video and they're basically scoffing at us saying, ‘Come on, it's a blurry video. What are you talking about?’ But the fact is, there's information in that video. And, as you know, you can actually learn a ton from just a few frames of video,” says Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick says the video proves the sighting can only be the elusive bird. “We see a black wing-tipped bird that is largely white-winged from underneath. So a big woodpecker with a lot of white at the back edge of its wings, and some white in the back, can only be an ivory-bill woodpecker.”