While following up on a report from the previous afternoon, I had an extended encounter with a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the Choctawhatchee River in Florida. The encounter began at 7:25 a.m. on January 19, 2007, when I kayaked around a bend in a small bayou and saw two large birds repeatedly swooping about in the distant treetops. A high-definition video camera, which was mounted on the kayak paddles, had been recording for nearly an hour and was nearing the end of the tape. Since the birds appeared to be about 100 m distant, the situation seemed favorable for an extended encounter, and I decided to rewind the tape. Due to blockage in the bayou, it was not possible to move closer in the kayak. I decided to remain in the kayak rather than risk flushing the birds and laid the paddle-cam setup in my lap with the camera aimed in the direction of the birds while watching the movements of the birds. During one of the swoops, I had a good view through binoculars of the dorsal surface of the right wing. The wing was fixed during the swoop, and a white trailing edge that extended nearly to the tip of the wing was clearly seen. Although solar glare was an issue during parts of the encounter, the wing was observed under favorable conditions when the bird was well to the side of the Sun. The encounter lasted for about 20 minutes, and the camera captured several interesting events.



At the 2:02 mark in the video, the camera captured a swooping takeoff (movie plays at half speed). The beginning of the takeoff appears in the upper right of the picture. The bird is hidden behind vegetation during part of the swoop, but it comes back into view in the lower left of the picture. When the bird briefly comes back into view further to the left (movie plays at half speed), the underwings appear white in the reflection from the water. The image above is a full frame of the high-definition video from which these clips were cropped. This image shows the blockage in the bayou that prevented me from moving closer in the kayak. The birds were far behind the trees along the bayou in the foreground. The black dots show points at which the bird was visible in the video during the swoop.



At 5:38, the camera captured a takeoff from behind a tree trunk (movie plays at full speed). The rapid, deep, and powerful flaps are remarkably similar to the flaps of an Imperial Woodpecker taking off (movie plays at full speed) in a film recently published by Lammertink et al. [Auk 128, 671–677 (2011)]. Such flaps do not seem to be consistent with any other candidate species, but they are consistent with historical accounts of takeoffs of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. About 23 s before the flight, the bird was perched on a horizontal tree branch before diving behind the tree (movie plays at full speed). The motion of the rear half of the bird is similar to the motion of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker diving into a cavity in unpublished footage from the Singer Tract. The image above is a full frame of the high-definition video from which these clips were cropped.



At about 13:00, I got out of the kayak and set the paddle-cam down but kept the camera running. Between 18:01 and 18:15, the camera captured a woodpecker climbing upward, moving to the right, moving back to the left, delivering two blows, and then taking off and showing lots of white on the left wing while swooping upward (movie plays at full speed). The audio contains an apparent double knock that is slightly out of synch with the blows, apparently due to the distance to the bird. The bird appears to have white on the belly during the double knock, but it’s easy to see that this is light-colored vegetation in the foreground by noting how the dark body emerges from behind the vegetation when the bird starts moving to the right about 5 seconds into the movie. While moving back to the left, the bird appears to awkwardly flail its wings similarly to how the Imperial Woodpecker flails its wings between frames 1105 and 1112 of the film. Four video clips that precede this footage were cropped from the scene shown above (these movies play at half speed). The underwings appear mostly white in an upward swoop at 15:23. The camera captured parts of flights at 17:11, 17:34, and 17:39 in which the trailing edges of the wings show flashes of white.