Ornithologist Jerry Jackson is positive of a sighting someday, even though many experts believe that the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Lord God woodpecker, finally is extinct.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published October 7, 2004
[Times photo: Jeff Klinkenberg]
During his sojourns in the Fakahatchee Strand, Dr. Jerry Jackson is ever alert for the call of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot’s painting of an ivory-billed woodpecker from Histoire Naturelle l’Oiseaux l’Amerique Septentrionale (Paris, 1807).
[Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia]
Eagles with fish clenched in their claws are sights birders and nature lovers attending Eckerd College’s birding and nature festival this weekend hope to see.
[Photo: James Shadle]
FAKAHATCHEE STRAND - The Holy Grail of American birds for the people who study them is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Twice declared extinct during the 20th century, the stubborn giant refused to go quietly into oblivion. Bingo, somebody would see one again.
But not often - and not for a long time now. Now most bird experts believe the ivory-bill has probably gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Dr. Jerry Jackson, the woodpecker man, is not among the naysayers. He believes there is a chance, however small, that a few ivory-bills are still winging their way through the most remote swamps of the Caribbean or deep South. Perhaps even in Florida.
"I would hate to say they're gone," says the Florida Gulf Coast University ornithologist, who will talk about his favorite species at the Florida Birding and Nature Festival that begins today and ends Sunday at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. Jackson, whose latest book is In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, will explain his four-decade quest at 4:30 p.m. Saturday in the Heron Room on campus.
Jackson, 61, has stalked the ivory-bill in the swamps of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, with six stops in Cuba in between. He is among the few people on earth who have heard the ivory-bill's comical toy trumpet song, and he is reasonably confident that he has caught at least a fleeting glimpse of the wary bird.
Ivory-bills were - are - the largest woodpeckers to inhabit the Americas, about 20 inches tall with a wingspan of almost a yard. They sported - sport - dramatic red, black and white plumage. Unlike the pileated woodpecker, commonly encountered in even the urban forests of Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, Jackson's ghostly bird has a spectacularly large, pale beak, more like a chisel than an ice pick.
Ivory-bills never - have never - cottoned much to civilization. Logging, development and inadequate forestry management made them an unusual sight even a century ago. They nested in large virgin cypress trees and often fed nearby in virgin pine trees. Alas, old-growth trees are in short supply these days.
"When you destroy habitat and the food supply, you have destroyed the species," says Jackson, ever the college professor.
In the 21st century it might be easier to find a yeti than an ivory-billed woodpecker.
"The Lord God woodpecker," says Jackson with a sigh. "That's what the old-timers called them."
Standing in the Fakahatchee Strand of southwest Florida, among the huge virgin cypress trees, he can easily imagine a 19th century homesteader, leaning against an ax perhaps, staring with awe into the darkness of the swamp beyond.
"Lord, God. What a woodpecker!"
The Almighty of woodpeckers
Back when Seminole Indians were exchanging musket shots with pioneer settlers, ivory-bills were found almost everywhere in Florida. As cross-cut saws took their toll, ivory-bills vanished.
Yet until the mid 20th century, they were still seen sporadically by people who knew birds in the Big Bend Area of Florida, at Fisheating Creek near Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades, including Big Cypress and what is called Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve today.
The Fakahatchee, like those other places, was logged hard. But some areas were so remote, and so wet, and so infested with alligators, snakes and mosquitoes, that loggers lost their nerve before they could get every tree. The Fakahatchee, an hour's drive from Jackson's Fort Myers office, is one of the woodpecker man's favorite places on earth.
Mosquitoes dive bomb his face; by midmorning, the humidity is what you'd expect on Venus. Cypress trees are mammoth here. Some are wrapped by strangler vines as thick as pythons. You won't find the T. rex here, but it is as close to Jurassic Park as the state gets. It is Florida panther, black bear and ghost orchid country.
And maybe something else.
Jackson hears a distant rapping.
"Listen."
There it is again.
"Ah," he says. "It's just a pileated woodpecker."
The pileated is a large, beautiful woodpecker, but it's not the Lord God woodpecker. Almost every day, Jackson receives a phone call or an e-mail from someone who has mistaken a pileated for an ivory-bill. Jackson automatically discounts most reports. Ivory-bills are not urban dwellers, after all; they are birds that require lots of wilderness. Draw an imaginary line around downtown Tampa and add an imaginary swamp with huge cypress trees adjacent to a virgin pine forest. That's how much space one pair of ivory-bills would require.
Yet sometimes Jackson hears a report that prompts him to jump into his car. He remembers the time he drove hundreds of miles to see the nesting ivory bills some amateur birders had just discovered in Mississippi. They turned out to be red-headed woodpeckers, beautiful black, white and red woodpeckers, very cool woodpeckers, in fact, but not of the Lord God variety.
Over recent decades, ivory-bills have been reported in Jonathan Dickinson State Park near West Palm Beach. They have been reported near the Suwannee River near Chiefland. They've allegedly been seen along the Chipola River in the Panhandle. Jackson has gone, looked and listened.
In vain.
Search for a sighting
A woodpecker man knows how to dress in a swamp. Even in the sticky heat he wears jeans, a flannel shirt and a floppy hat. He carries a camera bag and binoculars. Often he totes a machine to play the only known recording of an ivory-bill in song. He plays the sad trumpet sound, recorded in the 1930s by a Cornell scientist, walks a few hundred feet and plays it again. Usually the only reply is the wind through the trees.
Jackson traces his interest in birds to his days as a paperboy in Iowa, delivering the Des Moines Register every morning, when he began taking note of whatever winged creatures were around. He enjoyed watching phoebes swoop under street lights to inhale a variety of moths.
"I like to think I have learned something from every job I've ever had."
He remembers learning bird anatomy from his days as a teenage fry cook at the Chicken Shack. You won't find his recipes in a cookbook, but he has been known to sample roadkill more out of curiosity than hunger. For the record, pileated woodpeckers have a nutty, gamey taste.
At movies, he has trouble following the plot. "If I hear a bird on the soundtrack that doesn't belong, the film is ruined for me." He teaches a college course called "Nature on Film" at Gulf Coast University. His students watch Finding Nemo and write papers about marine biology. After an X-Files episode about modern-day cannibals, the assignment was to write about mad-cow disease.
"Oh, look here. Look here," says the Fox Mulder of the Fakahatchee Strand. Jackson examines a gargantuan cypress trunk riddled by holes. "This is the work of a pileated woodpecker," he says. "An ivory-bill wouldn't do this. An ivory-bill, with that chisellike bill, slices off the bark when it looks for beetle larvae."
He last saw evidence of ivory-billed woodpeckers in Cuba during a National Geographic expedition in 1988. Up in the eastern mountains, he saw trees that displayed the dramatic bill-work of the woodpecker. Eight times during the six-week trip, he heard their song. Determined to catch one on film, he set up his camera and aimed it at a likely tree a hundred yards distant.
It was 9:32 a.m. on March 2. Suddenly, only 30 feet away, a huge black, white and red woodpecker swooped across his field of vision. It happened so quickly that he never snapped a photograph. But he believes he saw what he saw.
And what about in North America?
In 1999, a wildlife student at Louisiana State University was turkey hunting in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area in the southeastern part of the state. David Kulivan, who considered himself an expert birder, watched the woodpecker pair closely for 10 minutes. They flew off - and he ran for a telephone.
Later, expert birders, including Jackson, combed the 35,000-acre swamp for a month, looking and listening for ivory-bills. They waded, canoed and slumbered in tents and in hammocks. They played the old tape of the ivory-bill and recorded 4,000 hours of swamp sounds.
They heard the songs of hundreds of birds, but not the one they wanted to hear most of all.
Hope never becomes extinct
Jerry Jackson loves listening to the birds and looking at the cypress and pond apple and pop ash and dahoon holly and sword fern in the Fakahatchee. He likes watching the gambusia minnows gulp mosquito larvae and the soft-shell turtles snoozing on fallen logs.
Civilization awaits back at the office, where he has to answer paper mail and e-mail and return phone calls, all about the ivory-billed woodpecker. Correspondents want information and hope. Not long ago, a young woman even requested a photograph of the lost woodpecker. Months later came an envelope in the mail.
It contained a photo of her new black, white and red tattoo.
The caption under the photo read: "Now I own the last living ivory-bill."
Driving through the Fakahatchee, headed back to civilization, Jerry Jackson hopes that caption is wrong.
- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com He will be at the festival tonight with his latest book, Seasons of Real Florida.
PREVIEW
Florida Birding and Nature Festival, today through Sunday, Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. S, St. Petersburg. Fees vary for field trips, speakers and seminars. Expo and plant sale, 11:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday, free. Just for Kids Saturday seminars on birding, butterflies, barn owls, more, free. Sunday family talks on Florida black bears, frog listening, Florida bats, $5 per family. Toll-free 1-866-352-2473 or www.flabirdfest.com
To see color illustrations of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and to watch the only moving picture of an ivory-bill ever taken, go to www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/IvoryBill/IBW.html.
