"Sooner or later, we’re going to have to let go"

Some excerpts from an ArkansasOnline article (subscription required), dated 9/3/07:

...More than three years after Hot Springs kayaker Gene Sparling spotted what he was sure was an ivory-billed woodpecker flying over the Cache River, the search continues for proof that the bird didn’t disappear along with much of the South’s bottomland hardwoods.
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One of [Luneau's] cameras, mounted to a milk crate in a canoe, captured the grainy video that became the main basis for the argument that the bird was alive. Critics claim that the bird on film was a pileated woodpecker or a plant.

Luneau continues to hold out hope.

“I continue to be surprised at how difficult this bird is to find,” he said.
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Researchers say skeptics don’t understand eastern Arkansas’ terrain.

“It’s a flying needle in a haystack,” Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Ron Rohrbaugh said of finding the bird. Rohrbaugh is the director of the lab’s ivory-billed woodpecker research project.

Dan Scheiman, bird conservation director for Audubon Arkansas, said ivory-billed woodpeckers “are a really shy bird.”

“They avoid people,” he said. “The Big Woods, they’re big. You don’t have a lot of visibility. Visibility is 50 yards at best.”

Even believers say they may never see the ivory-billed again.Others question whether the bird that searchers have dubbed “Elvis” might be as impossible to encounter as its namesake.

“You can’t prove something doesn’t exist,” said Jerome Jackson, a professor of biology at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, who has been critical of the evidence to date.

“There are lots of parallels to this search for the ivory-billed, beginning with the Loch Ness monster and others. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to let go,” said Jackson, who penned In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and whose research can be found throughout the recovery plan.
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The plan recommends spending nearly $28 million - a mix ofprivate and public money - between 2006 and 2010. That’s in addition to the nearly $11 million spent so far on recovery and conservation after the 2005 announcement, service spokesman Jeff Fleming said...
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The searchers will continue to use global positioning systems and aerial photography to find the most suitable habitat for the woodpecker, Rohrbaugh said. Helicopters may fly over the forest canopy to try to flush the bird out.

The lab will once again have a four-person mobile unit chase down promising leads in other states. The primary focus though will be on the White River.

Four field biologists will spend much of the winter camping in a remote section in the north area of the White Riverrefuge that researchers have “really yet to penetrate.”
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Acknowledging a growing skepticism in the broader scientific community, [Allan Mueller, avian conservation project manager for The Nature Conservancy] said the believers and nonbelievers are at an ideological impasse.

“There’s no talk about stopping the search,” Mueller said. “Obviously everybody’s morale would be great if we got that glossy 8-by-10, which we don’t [have].”
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Jackson points out that no highly trained ornithologists have seen the bird. With every news report, Jackson said, he’s inundated with calls about the bird, and he chalks the multiple sightings up to people seeing “what they want to see.”
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Just how much longer researchers will scour the Big Woods is up in the air.

Scheiman thinks the search should last for two more years, but he notes that, “Support is definitely going to dim the longer we go without finding anything.”

Update: A reader writes:

It would be amusing to run under the helicopter
dressed in a Bigfoot costume...