April 28, 2005

More than sixty years after the last confirmed sighting in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-billed woodpecker survived in the Big Woods of east Arkansas. Long believed to be extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered in 2004. Published in the journal Science, the findings included multiple sightings of the elusive woodpecker and frame-by-frame analyses of brief video footage. The evidence was gathered during an intensive year-long search in the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges in eastern Arkansas, involving more than fifty experts and field biologists working as part of the Big Woods Conservation Partnership, led by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy.