By Susan Milius
The knock-knock sounds recorded and replayed with such hope last January by ornithologists searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers turn out not to be bird noises at all. They’re gunshots, according to researchers at the Cornell (N.Y.) Laboratory of Ornithology.
An international team of bird experts spent a month last winter combing Louisiana’s Pearl River Wildlife Management Area for signs that the charismatic woodpecker, which had not been seen for years, had somehow escaped extinction (SN: 3/2/02, p. 141: Encouraging signs but no woodpecker). On Jan. 27, searchers recorded pairs of loud raps, as if a huge woodpecker were drumming on a hollow tree.