LITTLE ROCK — Brinkley’s time in the limelight is over and so is the hunt for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, the long-thought extinct bird whose reported re-discovery once catapulted the quiet eastern Arkansas Delta town to prominence.
Acting on a grainy video and 16 confirmed sightings of the bird thought extinct since the 1940s, researchers announced in 2005 that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been rediscovered in the woods near the Cache River and Bayou DeView north of Brinkley.
The announcement spawned a cottage industry around the ivory-billed woodpecker theme in the town of just under 3,200 people off Interstate 40, about 70 miles east of Little Rock. Shops selling T-shirts and other woodpecker trinkets, guided tours of the bird’s swampy habitat and other local ventures geared toward accommodating tourists that flocked to the area did booming business while the interest lasted.
Then in 2010, after five years of scouring the swamps and bayous in search of the elusive bird — at a cost of about $10 million — researchers with Cornell University and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service called it quits.
Not long after, the once booming business trading on the woodpecker’s lure went bust.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
“They all flew the coup,” Penny Childs laughed last week.
Childs owns Penny’s Hair Care, which still offers a woodpecker haircut for $25, although she says there are few takers these days.
“It was fun while it lasted,” said Childs, adding that the town, once a mecca for birders from across the world, national and international bird researchers, tourists and the media, has settled back down into its more familiar sleepy Delta farming lifestyle.
Tim Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Living Bird magazine, said the search for the rare woodpecker is not over, but on hold until the shy bird reappears.
“We may have ended our official search more than a year ago, but if we hear about a really great sighting we might go out,” Gallagher said. “We just don’t have the resources and the manpower to be able to spend unlimited time in the swamps.”
News of the ivory-billed woodpecker’s rediscovery was announced during simultaneous news conferences in Little Rock and Washington, D.C., in late April 2005, held in conjunction with the release of a Cornell University research paper that confirmed the bird’s existence.
Researchers boasted 16 documented sightings of the bird, and they showed a brief video of an ivory-billed woodpecker caught on camera.
The video was taken April 25, 2004, by David Luneau, an avid birder and associate professor of electronics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Within days of the announcement, researchers, tourists and the media converged on Brinkley. The Ivory-Billed Inn and RV Park soon opened, as did the Ivory-Billed Nest, which sold T-shirts and other woodpecker-related items.
Hundreds attended a large festival held the last weekend of February 2006 to commemorate the second anniversary of the woodpecker’s sighting.
Sandra Kemmer, who was executive director of the Brinkley Chamber of Commerce back then, said the event was “wonderful” and the goal was to have another in 2008. But that one and all subsequent planned gatherings never occurred because of a lack of funds, she said.
Kemmer said the woodpecker-related shops and businesses also didn’t last long because the local owners did not have the experience or the time to invest in their new ventures.
“They already had other businesses and just didn’t have the time,” she said, adding that the locals also lacked the advertising and promotional savvy to sustain the woodpecker-related businesses.
Gene Depriest, who opened Gene’s Barbecue in 1994, said the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker brought life to the town.
“For about four years we did real good,” he said, noting that his restaurant, the only one in town that did not sell fast food, was open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. and served as the gathering place for amateur birders, tourists and researchers and others who became regulars at the height of the woodpecker craze.
Depriest said his restaurant’s business rose about 25 percent and he sold more than 20,000 T-shirts between 2005 and 2009.
“We still have a few people come in, you know, tourists and bird watchers, but no Cornell people. It really died down,” he said last week.
Depriest said he believes the woodpecker is still in the area.
“You know the people that spotted it are real reputable,” he said. “I wouldn’t dispute their word.”
Childs said she is skeptical.
“Nothing is that evasive … with all the technology that they have out there today,” she said.
Still, the fact that the state Legislature created a special license plate for the woodpecker lends some credence to the notion that it might exist, Childs said.
“As crazy as that is, that has kind of convinced me that it might be real,” she said. “You know, when the government makes a license plate over it you would think they would be a little bit more solid. I bought one year but I didn’t renew it.”
The plate costs $35 more than a regular license plate. The added cost includes a $10 administrative fee, and $25 that goes to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for the agency’s conservation scholarship education fund and other programs.
Roger Duren, administrator of motor vehicles with the state Department of Finance and Administration, said last week that 3,424 license plates were sold in 2006, the first year they were available. Last year, 3,760 plates were sold or renewed, he said.
Chuck Volner, who grew up along Bayou DeView and regularly guided birders and researchers into the swamp when they were looking for the woodpecker, said he can’t remember ever seeing the bird, but he thinks he has heard its call.
The 78-year-old said he has heard recordings made by researchers studying the bird years ago, and they sound identical to bird calls he has heard over the years while on the bayou.
“When I heard that, I recognized the sound,” he said. “Evidently it was up and down that bayou there. I’ve heard that sound.”
Volner said that as a boy, he snared a woodpecker or two while hunting or trapping, but he didn’t know if the rare bird was one of them.
Gallagher, who said he saw the ivory-billed woodpecker during a trip to the area in 2004 — one of the 16 confirmed sightings — said he has no doubt the bird exists, but he worries about its future.
“If it was one individual bird, a young bird dispersing up the drainage, who knows where its parent’s nest is?” he said. “It might have been down to the Mississippi (River). There was a continuous line … 500,000 square miles of timber right there, a corridor only a mile wide or less in places. The bayou went all the way down by the Mississippi. Who knows where the bird could have come from?”
Gallagher said he is not surprised but disappointed that the bird hasn’t been seen, or photographed, since 2004.
“Back then, you know, I was so confident we could save the species,” he said. “I still hope that, but the fact that we went to a lot of places all across the South and we did find good habitat but we didn’t find any birds … they must be extremely, extremely rare and I don’t know if we will be able to save them.”
Tom MacKenzie, spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the woodpecker is listed on the “endangered” species list and “the overall status is unknown.”
“We’re still evaluating reports,” he said, adding that the agency often receives unconfirmed sightings of the woodpecker from people in Arkansas and other Southern states.
“We are encouraging additional searches but no public funds are available at this time,” he said.
At least five documentary films have been made about the ivory-billed woodpecker, including Ghost Bird, released in 2009.