Ghost bird: A look back at Ivory-bill fever
Ten years after Ivory-bill fever swept the nation, an expert on the iconic bird assesses the hope, hype, and disappointment.
Jerome A. Jackson
Jerome A. Jackson is professor emeritus at Florida Gulf Coast University and Mississippi State University, and a fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served in 1986 on an Ivory-billed Woodpecker Advisory Committee to evaluate the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and, more recently, on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Team, both appointed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He has searched for the woodpecker throughout the southeastern United States and, during a five-week expedition in 1988, in Cuba. He also served on the official planning team for a 2002 search in the Pearl River Swamp of Louisiana. He wrote the account on the Ivory-bill (No. 711) in The Birds of North America (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2002), and he is the author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Smithsonian Books, 2004, 2006).
Jerome A. Jackson on social media
Jerry Jackson assesses David Kulivan’s report of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the Pearl River Swamp, Louisiana
In our June 2002 issue, woodpecker expert Jerome A. Jackson wrote about attempts to find Ivory-billed Woodpeckers — and what it would mean if the birds were found.