The Debate Over The Four-Second Ivory Billed Film

The exuberance ornithologists felt when they thought they had found an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in Arkansas a couple of years ago has been replaced by frustration at not being able to verify the sighting. A film of the bird they believe is an Ivory Bill has been challenged by skeptics. Take a look yourself and you be the judge.

National Public Radio reports:

"the evidence is a four-second video taken in 2004 from a canoe in Arkansas' Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. It shows a perched bird partly behind a tree trunk. The bird then takes off and flies away from the camera.

It has become the Zapruder film of the birding world (Zapruder being the man whose home movie of the Kennedy assassination kept analysts busy for decades). Scientists at Cornell University say the pattern of white on the bird's wings is unique to an ivory-billed woodpecker. Skeptics say it's just a pileated woodpecker, which is a lovely bird, but as common as rice at a wedding." See film for yourself.