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 in Florida. During one of the swoops, I saw the field marks on the dorsal side of the right wing (which was fully extended and not flapping) through binoculars. 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. The way the bird dives behind the tree (or perhaps into a cavity) appears similar to the way an ivorybill dives into a cavity in this film from the Singer Tract. It has been suggested that the video actually shows a squirrel, but it seems unlikely that a squirrel would reside in the flooded forest in that area and that a large bird would have remained perched within a few feet 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 has lots of white on the underwings.

One of the other searchers, Bob O’Brien, arrived at the scene a few minutes after the encounter, and the camera was still recording when I told him about the sighting. I urged him to radio the other searchers, who had fanned out around the area after a sighting of a pair the previous day, and let them know about my sighting. As a temporary visitor, I was the only one at the Bruce Creek camp who didn’t have one of the radios, which were designed to simultaneously inform everyone of sightings and to automatically relay GPS coordinates. In describing the sighting to Bob, I mentioned the swooping behavior and the white trailing edge, and he radioed this information to the other searchers before I left the scene. It’s common practice among bird watchers to attempt to discredit those who report ivorybill sightings. Several months after my sighting in the Choctawhatchee, I heard that one of the other searchers claimed that I didn’t think much of the sighting or tell the other searchers about it. The audio recordings debunk those claims.