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Show Ivory Billed Woodpecker Seen in Florida Sanctuary NEW YORK The National Audubon Audu-bon society has announced the establishment estab-lishment of a 1,300 acre sanctuary for the ivory billed woodpecker in northwest Florida. The refuge has been made in the swamp forest along the Apalachicola river. It is there that the first ivory billed woodpeckers seen in many years were sighted by Whitney H. Eastman of Minneapolis, an amateur ama-teur bird watcher, last winter. They have been authentically located nowhere no-where else in the United States and long had been believed extinct. The Audubon society had been searching search-ing for the birds since 1937. John James Audubon described the bird, the largest, woodpecker in this country, in 1831, as slightly bigger big-ger than a crow, with black, white and scarlet feathers. As virgin hardwood forests were cut along river banks, the birds, which feed on borers in dying trees, disappeared. Every year many observers ob-servers mistake the pileated woodpecker wood-pecker for the rare ivory bill. |