Breaking: Video offered as evidence of Ivory-billed Woodpecker

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https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/conservation/exclusive-video-evidence-ivory-billed-woodpecker/

By Matt Mendenhall

Published July 19, 2022



This frame from Bobby Harrison’s video shows a bird with white trailing edges of its wings and black wingtips. © 2020 Bobby Harrison


On October 17, 2020, Bobby Harrison was in a canoe on a southern waterway heading back to his car when a large bird flew in front of him, turned, and then flew down the channel and out of his sight.

He says he knew immediately that the bird was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Harrison has been searching southern swamps for the species for more than 20 years, and it was an Ivory-bill sighting he had in 2004 with former Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher that set off a large search for the bird led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. That search effort ended in early 2007, and Harrison has continued looking for better evidence on his own ever since.

And that’s what he says he obtained with the October 2020 encounter. He was recording with a Sony video camera when the bird came into his view. The sighting lasted 9.8 seconds, and the video is, Harrison admits, not of high quality. Because it happened so fast, he couldn’t zoom in on the bird, for example. He never intended to make the video public, but eventually he did have a chance to “show it to a few people from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They were impressed with it, [and] thought it was perhaps the best evidence they had seen.”

FULL story at link at top.

This is huge news. The last sighting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker was 1944!


Plate 66 of Birds of America by John James Audubon depicting Ivory-billed Woodpecker via JSTOR