September 6, 2007

Florida’s Ivory-Bills Photographed

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Geoffrey Hill, Scharnagel Professor of Biology at Auburn University and author of Ivorybill Hunters: The Search for Proof in the Florida Panhandle told reporter Donathan Prater of the Opelika Auburn News that he has obtained three types of evidence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Campephilus principalis): audio, video, and photographic.

After getting a small grant, Hill and several of his colleagues traveled to the Florida Panhandle in January 2007. There, they set up listening stations and remote cameras, and indeed, did record the distinctive double-knocking sound and Kent calls the Ivory-billed Woodpecker makes. While in Florida, Hill and his colleagues were able to record both photo and video of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

Hill and a team of ornithologists from Auburn University and the University of Windsor have also published a paper detailing the evidence they’ve found supporting the existence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida.

The Ivory-bill is the largest species of woodpecker in the U.S. and one of the two largest species of woodpecker in the world, second in size only to the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico. This is a bird endemic to the most remote swamp/ wilderness areas of the South….

Sadly, this is a bird we almost let slip away. The first catastrophe for this bird was the loss of habitat with the clearing of vast Cypress forests in the South toward the end of the 19th and onset of the 20th centuries.

As the bird became rarer and rarer, the more prized a specimen became in personal collections.

Hill’s pursuit of better photographic evidence continues:

We just haven’t gotten a really good break yet in getting photos of this bird, but it does exist. I believe this is the sunrise on a new age of Ivory-bills, and once they’re proven to exist, we can go about preserving the habitat they live in.Professor Geoffrey Hill

Source: “Professor makes case for existence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers,” Opelika Auburn News, September 6, 2007.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

Filed under Artifacts, Breaking News, Cryptomundo Exclusive, Cryptotourism, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Expedition Reports, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Photos