By Wil Shane
Lyon College News Bureau
When it comes to re-discovering an animal species thought lost to extinction,
sometimes “it’s amazing where dumb luck will lead you.”Entrepreneur and naturalist Gene Sparling, who was the first to see an ivory-billed woodpecker alive since 1944, visited the Lyon College campus Tuesday, Sept. 12, to present a lecture on the bird as part of scheduled Convocation events.
An avid bird watcher during his youth, Sparling (pictured at right with Dr. Tom Carpenter, chairman of the Convocations Committee) told the audience he’d been fascinated by accounts of the extinct woodpecker since his boyhood and had often dreamed of finding it alive.
The first time authorities classified the ivory bill as extinct was in 1900, but naturalist Arthur Allen found a small group living in Florida in the 1920s. About a decade later, the only known surviving ivory bills lived in northeast Louisiana on a tract of land owned by the Singer Company.
However, Singer officials cared nothing about preserving the bird or its habitat and logged the area until only a single snag still stood in a clear-cut area. A snag is a standing dead tree often inhabited by woodpeckers of many types. This snag housed the last remaining ivory bills known to science, but in April 1944, a storm blew it down and no more sightings were confirmed until Sparling made his landmark discovery in 2004.
“It’s amazing where dumb luck can lead you,” he told the audience.
Sparling first spotted the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, a find that led to an extensive search in Arkansas. Since his initial observation in February 2004, Sparling has been actively involved in the search, serving as the project’s co-manager and working in the conservation and land acquisition efforts as well as public and community relations efforts.
Sparling, who began exploring the Big Woods in his kayak in 2003, has sought out wild and natural places throughout his life, exploring Arkansas’ Ozark and Ouachita mountains, as well the Rocky Mountains, and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. A native of Springfield, Mo., Sparling lives in Hot Springs, Ark.
“I heard there were 300-year-old trees in the Big Woods, so I wanted to see them and explore the area for my own enjoyment,” Sparling said. “I found out that, in fact, some of those trees are 1,000 to 1,200 years old. You can go see them and touch them.”
On a “cold winter morning,” Sparling set out in his kayak to explore the Big Woods and its swamp. On the second day of his excursion, he entered the old growth section of the swamp.
“You didn’t have to be an expert to know I’d entered an ancient, primeval forest,” he said.
While resting and observing the forest, he spotted a large woodpecker dropping through the treetops. It landed 60 feet away and he noticed the bird’s crest was red and laid down flat, coming to point. It had a light colored bill and a white saddle on its wing tips. The white extending to the trailing edge of the wings is a sure sign it’s an ivory bill and not the similar looking pileated woodpecker, he said.
When it flew away, he noticed it had a different flight pattern that a pileated, but he wasn’t ready to admit to himself – or to anyone else – that he’d seen the fabled ivory bill.
“Saying you saw an ivory bill is like saying you saw Sasquatch or been abducted by aliens,” he said. “…The entire experience lasted mere seconds. And it changed my life.”
The ivory-billed woodpecker once inhabited swampy forests in the southeastern and lower Mississippi valley states. Sightings were recorded from North Carolina to Florida and west to eastern Texas and Arkansas, with some reports in Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma in the 1800s. John James Audubon reported ivory bills as far north as the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers around 1825.
Averaging about 20 inches in length, the ivory-bill is frequently mistaken for the smaller but similarly marked pileated woodpecker. Ornithologists distinguish the two by the location of the white wing feathers. When seen from above, the full-width white patch in the ivory bill’s trailing wing feathers folds to form a white “saddle” on its back when the bird is perched. Males have a prominent scarlet crest; the female’s crest is black.
Sparling said he posted a “veiled reference” to the sighting on the Arkansas Canoe Club website, and heard from people encouraging him to take the sighting more seriously. That led to him doing more research on the bird. He found that Arkansas is in the historical range of the ivory bill.
He then corresponded with Tim Gallagher at Cornell University, which has one of the top ornithology departments in the world. The two men, along with ivory-bill enthusiast and authority Bobby Harrison of Alabama, met at Bayou De View to look for the bird.
Again, on the second day of the trip, Harrison and Gallagher spotted the bird for themselves.
“It was a powerful moment for all of us,” Sparling said.
Cornell University, working in conjunction with the Arkansas Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, organized the largest search for an endangered species in U.S. history, utilizing 30 full-time and 70 part-time searchers.
“I wanted someone from Arkansas to lead conservation efforts, so I took it to Scott Simon at The Nature Conservancy,” Sparling said. “That’s the best thing I did in this whole thing.”
The search led to 15 confirmed sightings but no photographs other than a brief glimpse of an ivory bill on videotape. The team enhanced the video at Cornell and it clearly shows an ivory bill flying away from the searchers shooting video from a canoe.
The team submitted their evidence to the Journal of Science and they published it as a cover story.
“The resulting reaction took everyone by surprise,” Sparling said. “We heard from people from all over the world who wanted to know more. Calls came in from Hanoi, Paris, Calcutta. It was amazing.”
Of the 550,000 acres of swamp and forest in the Big Woods, 320,000 acres are now in conservation. But to ensure the survival of the magnificent bird, the remaining acreage must be conserved as well, according to Sparling.
“This has been a dream from my childhood,” Sparling said. “A marvelous dream has been laid before me, and before us all.”
“Ordinary people” with extraordinary dedication is what it will take to ensure the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker, he added.
“Ordinary people can have a powerful effect in this world,” Sparling said. “You can have an effect of which you’ve only dreamed.”