LONDON: Researchers at Aberdeen University do not believe reports on the sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, believed extinct, in an Arkansas swamp in 2004.
A video footage captured by a scientist, David Luneau, had claimed the bird as living in the swamps and ornithologists were then thrilled at the prospects. The report had also brought hopes among bird enthusiasts that several other extinct birds could be surviving in isolated places.
However, the bird was never found again in spite of continuous watch in the area, including those aided by robots.
Now, Dr Martin Collinson, a professor at Aberdeen University, says the video footage could be that of a pileated woodpecker in flight. He has studied the video with a footage of the pileated woodpecker, or Dryocopuys pileatus, which is a superficially similar black and white species, and says the bird in the earlier footage appears to have black trailing wing edges unlike the unique white features found in the ivory-billed woodpecker, or Campephilus principalis.
Collinson also found that the bird captured in the Arkansas footage appeared to be flapping its wings at the rate a pileated woodpecker would flap -- 8.6 times per second.
Collinson's research work has been published in the BMC Biology journal. He says a poor quality video of pileated woodpecker can look like ivory-billed woodpecker and a mistake can be made. And he feels in this case a mistake has indeed been made.
Collinson says the large size and colorful plumage of the extinct bird would surely have been seen by many in follow-up surveys by now if it had really existed.
Many scientists, however, believe the footage showed an ivory-billed woodpecker. They do not concur with Collinson's finding.
The last confirmed sighting of the bird was in 1944. Meanwhile, automated cameras have now been installed in the Big Woods refuge in Arkansas to continue the search for the elusive bird and ornithologists are hopeful these studies will bring out the fact conclusively.
Earlier too, the Arkansas finding had been questioned. A leading North American bird watcher, David Sibley, and his team had countered the claim and had said the reports published by Luneau's team in the journal Science are incorrect. Sibley had said there could be several alternative explanations for the plumage patterns of the ivory-billed woodpecker captured in the video.
The ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in North America, which was once valued for its magical powers by native Americans, had vanished after millions of acres of forest land were cleared.
