By Susan Langenhennig
St. Tammany bureau/The Times-Picayune

A half hour before daybreak on a cool spring morning, hunter David Kulivan rested his back against an oak tree in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area and waited for a turkey to come into his sights.

But there would be no turkey sightings that day. What Kulivan says he saw a few hours later was a glimpse of the past.

Kulivan, a Terrytown resident and wildlife and forestry graduate student at Louisiana State University, is convinced he spotted a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers, a species long thought to be extinct.

While some scientists remain skeptical, the sighting in April near Slidell has triggered a burst of excitement among state and federal biologists, halted timber harvesting and prompted a series of expeditions into the forest seeking confirmation, including a trip Saturday during which Kulivan and others tried to catch another glimpse.

A crow-size, black and white bird with a pearly beak, the ivory-billed woodpecker is on the federal list of endangered and threatened species. But among scientists, the bird is commonly considered to have vanished from North American forests.

*** Claim like an Elvis sighting ***

The last documented U.S. sighting was in the early 1940s in a hardwood grove near Tallulah in northeastern Louisiana, according to state biologists.

"It's a little like saying you've spotted Elvis or Bigfoot or a UFO," said Van Remsen, curator of birds and a professor of biological sciences with the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in Baton Rouge.

"When David Kulivan first came in and told us about it, we put him through the ringer. We did everything but tie him down and administer truth serum," Remsen said.

After much interrogation, Kulivan's claim is being taken seriously.

Since the sighting, state wildlife officials and endangered species experts from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have organized more than 10 trips into the 34,000-acre state management area, scouting for clues of the birds' existence. The search was suspended during the summer because of dense foliage but resumed in January.

While the search is under way, the state has halted timber harvesting in the area, said Gary Lester, director of the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries' Natural Heritage Program, which tracks 600 to 700 endangered or threatened plants, animals and ecosystems in the state.

"We don't really know what the birds' needs are, if they do exist in that area," Lester said. "We have been doing controlled clear-cutting in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area for some time, but we don't know if that's good or bad for these birds."

*** Mistaken identities ***

To an untrained observer, ivory-bills could easily be mistaken for their commonly found cousin, the pileated woodpecker. But the species have some distinct differences.

While both birds are mostly black with patches of white on their wings, the ivory-bills are much larger birds and have more white feathers visible when in flight. Both birds have red heads, except for the female ivory-bill, which has a black head. The female pileated also has a crimson crest.

Novice bird watchers often report ivory-bill sightings to the Natural Heritage Program, but they almost always are seeing pileated woodpeckers, said Steve Shively, the program's zoologist who is organizing the ivory-bill search.

"We had one report from a guy who was convinced he had ivory-bills in his back yard and had a videotape of them. We looked at the tape, and it was pileated. But we always check them out," Shively said.

When Kulivan reported seeing the birds in the Pearl River wildlife area, the account raised a few eyebrows among state scientists. Unlike others, however, Kulivan could describe the event in detail, touching on characteristics of the species not widely known, Remsen said.

Kulivan also is a graduate student studying wildlife and an avid hunter familiar with pileated woodpeckers, all things that gave credence to his claim.

"He noticed that the crest was curling forward, which is something not even mentioned in most descriptions," Remsen said.

The Pearl River area shares similarities with a tract in northeastern Louisiana where the birds' nests were last documented, Remsen said.

"The timber data we have from that general region is promising. There is a fair number of big sweet gum trees, and sweet gum was prominent in the Singer Tract," where the birds were recorded in the 1940s, Remsen said.

*** Maybe birds passing through ***

Ivory-bills live in recently dead hardwood trees, particularly sweet gums and oaks. Using their beaks like a scalpel, they peel shallow layers of bark off the trees and feast on the larvae of wood-burrowing grubs living in the trunks.

But while the Pearl River area is home to the types of trees thought to be the ivory-bills' favorite, the forest lacks a large quantity of dead wood, Shively said.

"Just walking through here, this is not what I would imagine would be good ivory-bill territory," Shively said. "My personal theory is that if he did see the birds here, they're not staying here. They're just passing through."

Large birds known to travel up to six miles in search of food, the ivory-bills easily could have flown over to the neighboring Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge or the wooded area bordering the John C. Stennis NASA Space Center in Mississippi, Shively said.

On a recent Friday, Shively and Natural Heritage Program biologist Bill Vermillion grabbed their binoculars and trekked into the Pearl River management area.

Using Global Positioning Satellite, known as GPS, coordinates plotted on previous trips, they trod through thick underbrush for about 20 minutes before finding the wooded spot where Kulivan first spied the birds.

Examining a large hole in a magnolia tree, they decided it was unlikely that the birds were in the vicinity. Every so often the low "wuk, wuk" call of the pileated woodpecker resonated in the woods.

The area lacked the ivory-bills' distinctive "kint," a sound similar to a loud, flat note from a toy trumpet.

*** In search of dead wood ***

Crossing Indian Bayou, Shively and Vermillion headed north-northwest of the initial sighting area, scouring the landscape for dead trees.

After about two hours, they came across the remnants of a sweet gum, its bark scaled back in several places. On top of the tree, which appeared to have been dead for at least a year, were two large holes, possibly large enough for an ivory-bill's home.

"It's interesting, but it doesn't prove or disprove anything to me," Vermillion said, as he jotted down a description of the tree in his field guide and marked the spot on the GPS.

In future expeditions, other scientists will return to the site to take a closer look.

In the meantime, Kulivan said he's sticking to his story.

"There's no doubt in my mind what I saw," he said. "All I know is that I've been hunting out there and spotted a deer and a turkey once, and I've never seen them again, either. It's like finding a needle in a haystack."

IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER

Scientific name: Campephilus principalis

Range: Formerly found throughout the Southeastern United States up to the Ohio River valley.

Habitat: Old-grove hardwood forests

Diet: Larvae of wood-burrowing grubs found under the bark of recently dead hardwood trees

Call: A high, loud, nasal "kint" noise, sounding similar to a toy trumpet

Source: National Geographic Field Guide to Birds of North America