A recent rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker has links with McClellan through Dr. Geoffrey E. Hill.

Dr Hill and his colleagues at Auburn University announced recently that they may have found evidence of the thought-to-be-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the swamps of the Florida panhandle. The initial study team of Dr. Hill and two research assistants, Tyler Hicks and Brian Rolek, launched their kayaks on May 21, 2005 into the Choctawhatchee River and within the first two hours had heard the diagnostic double rap of the Ivory-billed, spotted the bird flying through the canopy and found large cavity entrances and places where woodpeckers had scaled tightly adhering bark from recently dead trees. All indications that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker might exist in the mature swamp forest.

Hill is a scientist that is well known to McClellan’s scientific community through his work on the effects of forest fragmentation on the nesting density of ground-nesting birds in the 1990s. He also has published work on breeding bird density of Mountain Longleaf Pine forests in the nearby Talladega National Forest. You can read about his latest research in a special feature in the Anniston Star (linked below) or to see an Ivory-billed that was collected and mounted in the 1930’s visit the Anniston Museum of Natural History. Dr. Hill’s McClellan forest fragmentation research can be downloaded from Auburn University's website or read a summary of the research in Science Daily. More on the Florida search for the Ivory-billed can be found on the Auburn website.

read the Anniston Star article 9/26/2006