The wings seen round the world were captured on four seconds of video filmed in an Arkansas swamp by M. David Luneau, MS EE 81, the first person to record an image of the bird in nearly 70 years.

The ivory-bill is the third-largest woodpecker in the world and the biggest north of Mexico. Three inches longer than more common pileated woodpecker, the ivory-bill stands about 20 inches tall and flies with an impressive 30-inch wingspan. The yellow-eyed bird has a jet black body with large white patches on its wings, which, when closed, form a large shield of white on the lower back. The bill is not made of ivory at all, but of keratin-covered bone.

In 1935, Arthur A. Allen, founder of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, made the only motion picture and audio recordings of the bird in Louisiana. By the end of the decade, only an estimated 25 ivory-bills remained in the United States. The last fully documented sighting, also in Louisiana, occurred in April 1944.

Luneau's digital video changed everything. When it was unveiled at an April 28 press conference in Washington, D.C., John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, said, "Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives."

Luneau has been a bird-watcher since his childhood in Pine Bluff, Ark. Still, there was little time to follow birds as he pursued his undergraduate degree at Rice University, married and moved to Atlanta to earn his master's at Georgia Tech. In 1991, he accepted a teaching post at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, where he is an associate professor of electronics and computers.

From time to time Luneau picked up a book on birding. "If you read any bird book, it said the ivory-billed woodpecker was ‘probably extinct' or ‘possibly extinct.' It was like throwing down a challenge," he says.

In January 2000 a report hit a birding list that a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers may have been spotted in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area in Louisiana.

"I knew immediately I had to go," says Luneau, who enlisted his brother to accompany him to the Pearl River for a long weekend in February 2000. A few weeks later he returned with three other people. "In the winter of 2001, four of us again went for a week — all to no avail.

"I thought, ‘I need to find a way to make this my job.' But engineering and birding don't necessarily go together. Then I came up with the idea of audio-recording devices out in the woods as a constant presence to detect ivory-billed sounds," Luneau says.

"In spring 2002 I applied for a sabbatical for the purpose of working toward an audio-recording system. The very next day I saw an ad on a bird list for two researchers needed for a 30-day trip to the Pearl River to look for the ivory-billed woodpecker," he says.

Luneau was selected to participate in the expedition and place autonomous sound-recording devices on trees there. The researchers came away with no proof that the shy ivory-billed woodpecker still existed in Louisiana.

In January 2003, he received a grant of a few hundred dollars from the Arkansas Audubon Society Trust to conduct a habitat analysis of the White River National Wildlife Refuge. Word spread in the birding world and he soon had seven assistants, including an opera singer from New York and a tree surgeon from Rhode Island.

They found a habitat conducive to the ivory-billed woodpecker and bark scaled off trees, indicative of the bird's search for beetle larvae. Yet again, they saw no actual ivory-bills.

By the dawn of 2004, Luneau had no plans to return to the White or Pearl rivers. Then on Feb. 11, a kayaker and nature enthusiast by the name of Gene Sparling saw a woodpecker he considered too big to be of the pileated variety during a trip through the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, one of the few remaining examples of the Mississippi Delta wetland ecosystem, a 550,000-acre corridor of floodplain forest in eastern Arkansas known as the Big Woods. Sparling wrote about the bird he saw on the Arkansas Canoe Club Web site.

Tim Gallagher, editor-in-chief of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, got wind of the sighting. He and a birding friend, Bobby Harrison, an associate professor of art history at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Ala., met in Arkansas. On their second day in the Big Woods, at 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 27, 2004, an ivory-billed woodpecker flew directly in front of their canoe and fully revealed its dorsal wing pattern.

A search team, including Luneau representing the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, formed the Big Woods Conservation Partnership, led by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy.

Luneau was tasked with rigging up cameras with integrated infrared heat and motion sensors within a two-mile radius in the "hot zone" near Brinkley, Ark., the closest town to the Bayou DeView swamps where the bird had been spotted. The cameras were strategically placed to point at trees with significant bark scaling indicative of the ivory-bill's presence.

"On April 25, 2004, I went out with my brother-in-law to check the still cameras. I kept my video camera mounted in the canoe rolling the whole time," he says. "We were just starting to turn off the channel and I turned to lift the trolling motor out of the water. It locked into place and flushed a bird off a tupelo tree. It was about five or six feet off the water."

His brother-in-law saw red on the bird's head as it flew away from the canoe. Luneau had been picking up his paddle, but he caught a glimpse of a black-and-white pattern. The video camera also caught the bird.

The digital images he downloaded to his computer were small, in the corner of the screen and blurry. "There was so much white on the bird, but I was not confident. You get one chance to destroy your credibility," he says.

Luneau studied the digital footage over and over. He finally noticed "black, white, black, a speck on a tree. I couldn't believe I was seeing that. But it was very, very small, a 6-pixel bird. If I couldn't convince myself, I couldn't convince anyone else," he says.

He told Cornell's Fitzpatrick he might — or might not — have something. The Cornell Lab director flew to Little Rock for a "video-watching party" at Luneau's home in early May 2004. About 20 people were there to watch 42 seconds of film, including a four-second flight of 11 wing beats revealing extensive white on the trailing edges of the wings.

Luneau gave a copy of the footage to the Cornell Lab, which began sharpening the images by deinterlacing the video, zooming in on the bird and slowing the speed of its flight.

While Cornell worked on a frame-by-frame analysis of the video, Luneau returned to the Big Woods to measure the trees shown on the footage to determine the exact size of the bird. "We had to process it scientifically. It took five trips to prove it indisputable. The bird was too big to be a pileated."

The research team planned to report the astounding rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the May 19 issue of Science. But what Luneau calls an "e-mail leak" derailed the plan to break the story in the scientific journal.

Luneau was among the team members who met with representatives from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and scheduled a press conference in Washington, D.C., for April 28, the same day the paper was rushed to online publication on the Sciencexpress Web site.

No one is certain whether seven documented sightings in the Big Woods in 2004 were all of the same bird. Luneau says the bird he recorded "was probably born in the '90s, but it could have been born in the 21st century."

This gives scientists hope that a mating pair could exist. "I am very lucky to be part of it," Luneau says. "It's a bird for the world."

©2005 Georgia Tech Alumni Association