At 7:25 a.m. on January 19, 2007, I spotted a pair of ivorybills swooping around in the distant canopy in the Choctawhatchee River Basin in Florida. When one of them took a short flight, I got a brief (but good) view through binoculars of the field marks on the dorsal side of the right wing. This sighting is brought to life in the artwork above, which Michael DiGiorgio painted onto a photo of the scene that was obtained during the encounter. The birds were in the canopy, far behind the trees that appear in the foreground.



I was fortunate to obtain a brief video of one of the birds as it took off in level flight from the broken-off tree in the bright background near the middle of the above image. This version of the video was cropped without enlarging and plays at half speed (as do the other clips presented on this web page). The bird has the same deep and rapid flaps as the bird in the this clip from the 2006 Pearl video. The popping noise as the bird takes off could be a wing hitting a branch.



About twenty seconds before flying from behind the tree, the bird was visible in the open as shown in this video. A few people who inspected this clip initially suggested that it was a squirrel, but this now seems unlikely for several reasons. The tree, which appears near the center of this image, has been dead for years and is isolated from other trees in a flooded forest. It seems unlikely that a squirrel would climb to the top of such a tree. It also seems unlikely that a bird would have remained perched within a foot or two of a squirrel for about twenty seconds before flying. When the bird hops across the fork in this clip from the 2006 Pearl video, its movements prior to the wings opening are similar to the movements of the bird that hops behind the tree trunk in the Choctawhatchee video. The image above illustrates these similarities. A flap is required for the long hop in the Pearl video but not for the short hop in the Choctawhatchee video.



In this clip, one of the birds swoops down from the upper right corner of the picture, disappears behind vegetation, and then reappears near the lower left corner of the picture in a flight that has begun to level off. This swooping behavior is consistent with a historically documented ivorybill behavior. The trajectory of the bird is shown in the image above (the position of this trajectory is far behind the trees in the foreground). The black dots indicate some of the positions where the bird is visible in the video. The yellow and green dashed curves indicate possible extrapolations of the trajectory. In this clip, the bird swoops upward and shows lots of white on the underwings. In this clip, the bird swoops down near the bottom center of the picture. In this clip, the bird swoops upward near the bottom center of the picture. This event occurred only eight seconds after the bird flew from behind the tree. The timing and location are just right for it to be the same bird, but it would have had to sweep around and change direction. It's possible that the bird was moving to another vantage point to keep an eye on me from a distance (as the bird in the 2006 Pearl video did by taking a short flight).