January 23, 2008
Without Proof, an Ivory-Billed Boom Goes Bust
By LARA FARRAR--NY Times


BRINKLEY, Ark. — David Baxter, 62, has hunted the Big Woods in eastern Arkansas for most of his life. But these days, his weapon of choice is an old 35-millimeter camera with a zoom lens, which he keeps in his blue pickup truck at all times just in case he comes across an ivory-billed woodpecker.



“God help me, I am trying,” said Mr. Baxter, who thinks nothing of camouflaging himself in front of old swampy cypress trees for up to three hours in case the elusive bird makes an appearance. “No matter what I am doing, I am looking.”



Before 2005, Mr. Baxter, along with many of his neighbors, had never heard of an ivory-billed woodpecker. They certainly never imagined such a creature would emerge from the darkness of extinction and become a symbol of hope for their increasingly endangered delta towns.



But one day, it seemed one did.



It has been almost three years since a research team, led by Cornell University and the Nature Conservancy, announced the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods — a 550,000-acre tract of bottomland hardwood forest. Researchers have also reported spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker in a northwest Florida swamp.



The large, yellow-eyed bird had not been conclusively seen in the United States since around the end of World War II, and some scientists have questioned whether the more recent reports of sightings are legitimate. Nevertheless, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service has recommended spending $27 million on recovery efforts for the woodpecker.



The patch of Arkansas bayou where the researchers said they spotted the bird is in the heart of Monroe County. Once an agricultural and manufacturing center, the county is now one of the poorest places in Arkansas. For its roughly 10,000 residents, the reported rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker fired hopes of an economic turnaround not seen since the soybean boom of the 1970s.



After the sighting was announced, local economies seemed to benefit for a while as scientists, bird-watchers and news media outlets from around the world flocked to Brinkley and to the other communities in the patchwork quilt of fragmented forest and farmland that surrounds the Big Woods.



“People came from everywhere,” said Gene DePriest, who still has an ivory-billed cheeseburger, salad and dessert on the menu of his barbecue restaurant in Brinkley. “I sold over $20,000 worth of T-shirts in six months.”



Lately, though, the ivory-billed boom has pretty much been a bust, especially since researchers and bird-watchers have, so far, failed to take a definitive picture of the woodpecker. A blurry video clip released when the rediscovery was announced failed to convince many ornithologists of the animal’s existence. There have since been plenty of purported sightings, but still no picture.



“It has been kind of a disappointment,” said Penny Childs, owner of Penny’s Hair Care and creator of the “woodpecker haircut,” which she does not get many requests for anymore. “The delta could use millions of dollars to build up our lives, but instead we struggle.”



Mrs. Childs, 43, is still cutting hair, but just down the street from her small one room salon, an empty brick building is all that remains of the Ivory-Bill Nest gift shop, which closed last January. Down the street, the former Ivory-Billed Inn and R.V. Park is now a Days Inn.



“I did invest a lot of money in stuff to sell, and I didn’t even break even,” Mrs. Childs said. “I have got a whole yard full of wooden woodpeckers right now.”



But beneath the disappointment and piles of unsold ivory-billed T-shirts, coffee cups and wooden woodpeckers, remnants of the bird are everywhere, and they can be found with people like Mr. Baxter.



At his home, he has a brown briefcase full of photographs of birds. Most are blurry shots of hoot owls and hawks taken by an automatic camera he hung 10 feet up a tree in the middle of a swamp. But in two pictures, he swears he captured the ivory-billed.



“I know what I seen and what I didn’t see,” said Mr. Baxter, holding two 3x5 photos with tiny black flecks flying against a deep blue sky. “I have been a hunter all my life, so I know my birds.”