In the bayou, a flash of feathers long thought lost

The Big Woods area includes the Cache River and White River Wildlife Refuges and adjacent bottom-land hardwood forest, a roughly 550,000-acre area that is a patchwork of old growth and younger trees.

Many questions remain: Is there more than one bird? If there is a male and female, or more, can the thin population find each other in this vast area?

As it was swiftly disappearing into the trees along the murky waters of the dense, jungle-like slough that wound through the area, Gallagher recalled, in an exclusive phone interview with the Monitor, watching his holy grail disappear. And searching fruitlessly for three days after that.

Immediately after their sighting, Gallagher and Mr. Harrison simultaneously shouted the identification and swung cameras to focus - but the ivory-billed was gone. After writing up field notes and sketching the bird, they talked quietly about the find.

Soon, Harrison fell silent. "I saw an ivory-billed," he said softly to himself, tears rolling down his cheeks, Gallagher recalls.

But to make doubly certain after so many unconfirmed reports, Gallagher and Harrison's sighting was kept a tight secret for the past year. Dozens of Cornell University researchers - all signing a confidentiality agreement - paddled and poked through the remote swamps looking for further confirmation. But in all, just 16 square miles of the vast area was thoroughly searched. No nests were found.

Two months after the first confirmation, came a major break - a four-second videotape clip of the ivory-billed in flight taken by M. David Luneau, an associate professor of electronics and computers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and longtime birder. His video added a critical piece of evidence to seal Gallagher and Harrison's sighting.

It came almost by accident. As Dr. Luneau was trying to quietly lower a trolling motor on his canoe into the water, the metal latch clicked. A large bird shot out of a nearby tree, startled by the noise, Gallagher says. But the video camera was running on its own, sitting on the front of the canoe - and it miraculously captured the bird in flight, he says.

The whole mission was itself a long shot. Gallagher had gone to the swamps of northern Arkansas on the thin thread of an Internet note from a kayaker who described seeing a huge woodpecker on a river in Arkansas. If nothing else, Gallagher figured, it would provide more grist for his book on sightings of the ivory bill over the years.

Gallagher recalls how as he, Harrison and kayaker Gene Sparling paddled into ever more remote country, the group found themselves suddenly gliding beneath a highway bridge. Dismayed by this jarring evidence of civilization, the men let down their guard.

As Sparling paddled ahead looking for a dry spot to land and have lunch, Gallagher and Sparling dropped their whispers, speaking in normal voices until Harrison suggested that despite the road noise, they should be silent and listen. Gallagher joked that perhaps Sparling would chase one back down the river channel toward them. That may be what happened.

Off in a little side slough of the river to his right, Gallagher suddenly spotted a large black and white bird flying up the channel. The two researchers were in an open area - and the bird finally flew across in front of them at close range and in good light. Later measurements and GPS readings revealed the bird had been 68 feet away.

"It was more beautiful than we could even have anticipated," Gallagher says. "We had been looking at museum specimens dead for a century. And here was this one alive and landing on a tree ahead of us."

For the past year the Cornell team has been attempting, without success, to find a mating pair, or a nest. It is possible that the seven sightings were all the same bird.

Gallagher desperately hopes not. One day, he hopes the Big Woods Partnership will help to make this majestic, holy grail of birds a far more common sight.

"My dream is that my great, great-grandchildren will be able to see a place like the virgin cypress forests we once cut down - and with the ivory-billed flying through it."

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