Buffalo Bayou

The recent sightings of the elusive ivory billed woodpecker in Arkansas have revived interest in this magnificent bird that was thought to be extinct. In the past, none other than John James Audubon himself had reported seeing the ivory billed woodpecker in the Houston area.

At 19 to 21 inches in length and weighing from 1.0 to 1.25 pounds, the ivory billed woodpecker is the second largest woodpecker in the world. It is only slightly smaller than the Imperial Woodpecker of western Mexico, which is also believed to be extinct.

The ivory billed woodpecker can be visually identified by its shiny blue-black body with extensive white markings on its neck and on both the upper and lower trailing edges of its wings. It has a pure white bill and a prominent top crest which is red on the male of the species and black on the female. The bird can also be recognized by its alarm call, a "kent" which sounds like a toy trumpet repeated in a series or as a double note.

The ivory billed woodpecker prefers thick hardwood swamps and pine forests with large amounts of dead and decaying trees where the birds feed mainly on the larva of wood boring beetles. A mating pair needs about ten square miles of forest for enough food for them and their young.

The original range of the ivory billed woodpecker was in the primeval hardwood forests from East Texas to North Carolina, and from southern Illinois to Florida and Cuba. The bird's habitat was reduced as the timber industry deforested millions of acres in the South after the Civil War. By the late 1800's, the loss of habitat from heavy logging activity and the hunting of the bird by collectors had decimated their population.

By 1938, only about 20 individual ivory billed woodpeckers remained in the wild. Prominent biologist John Dennis took the last scientifically accepted photographs of the ivory billed woodpecker in 1948 in Cuba.

Yet, in 1966, John Dennis reported seeing the ivory billed woodpecker in the Big Thicket of East Texas, but the sighting could not be confirmed. In late February, 1968, Dennis and Armand Yramategui, a Houston naturalist and namesake for Armand Bayou, recorded what may have been kent calls of the ivory billed woodpecker in the Neches River bottom land forests of the Big Thicket. Unfortunately, it was too foggy to see the bird, and the sound analysis of their recordings proved inconclusive. The critics said that it may have been mimicry by a blue jay. Others contend that the findings were thwarted by those seeking to prevent legislation to preserve the Big Thicket pending in Congress at the time.

For nearly forty years after the ivory billed woodpecker was listed as an endangered species on March 11, 1967, the outlook for the species was bleak. Then, there were reports of the sightings of at least one male ivory billed woodpecker during 2004 and 2005 in Arkansas. A very large ivory billed woodpecker was video taped on April 25, 2004, and the news of the recovery of the species was reported in the journal Science on April 28, 2005.

The situation today is a far cry from the way things were in an earlier time, and that brings us back to John J. Audubon.

On April 24, 1837, John J. Audubon and his son John arrived in Galveston where they were officially greeted by the secretary of the Texas Navy, Samuel R. Fisher. They spent a month observing wildlife from Galveston to Houston, and Audubon met with President Sam Houston at Houston in Houston's dog-trot cabin that served as his "White House" at the time.

Audubon expressed his dismay at the abundance of mud in the streets and the incomplete construction of many of the buildings in town. Nevertheless, Audubon's stay in the Houston area offered him the chance to complete his research on the birds of the Gulf Coast. Audubon's technique for studying birds, like the ivory billed woodpecker, was to shoot the bird, then arrange it on a board using pins and string. From the constructed model, he would draw the specimen, usually as a life size illustration, on paper. Although he struggled financially at the time he produced his folios, John James Audubon's single print of the ivory billed woodpecker, Plate LXVI from his Birds of America series, sells for around $125,000 today.

In the 1840 edition of Birds of America, John J. Audubon had this to say about the ivory billed woodpecker: "I have only to add to what I have said of the habits and distribution of this species, that I found it very abundant along the finely wooded margins of that singular stream, called 'Buffalo Bayou,' in the Texas, where we procured several specimens."

A singular stream, indeed.

Houston has many aspects of its history for which its residents can be proud. The City's historic association with the ivory billed woodpecker is just one more feather in its cap, so to speak.