In the bayous of eastern Arkansas, amidst ancient trees both living and dead that provide nourishment to creatures of the swamp, hangs a high-tech sentinel patiently waiting to capture video of an elusive bird once thought to be extinct.

Developed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University, the high-resolution intelligent robotic video system installed in the Bayou DeView area of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas is part of a major effort to locate the ivory-billed woodpecker in its historic habitat, the bottomland forests of the southeast United States.

If the researchers obtain conclusive photographic evidence of the woodpecker, it will settle a debate that has become heated in recent years and fascinated millions of people around the world, from bird-watchers and environmentalists to Arkansas farmers and duck hunters.

In the meantime, the new robotic video system provides detailed video sequences of other birds, suggesting a new high-tech approach to doing field biology work.

Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor of industrial engineering and operations research, and of electrical engineering and computer sciences, will present initial samples from this video system on Saturday, Feb. 17, at a news briefing on the future of robotics at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco.

The robotic video system is part of a new project, called Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments (CONE) and funded by the National Science Foundation, to develop automated systems that can observe and record detailed natural behavior in remote settings. Goldberg and his former graduate student, Dezhen Song, now an assistant professor of computer science at Texas A&M, are co-principal investigators of the project.

In the early stages of the video system's development, Goldberg worked with Robert Full, professor of integrative biology and director of the Poly-PEDAL (Performance, Energetics, Dynamics, Animal Locomotion) Laboratory at UC Berkeley. "We call it COLABCAM for collaborative lab camera, and it is meant to show experiments in progress on animals to our robot collaborators," said Full, who will join Goldberg at the AAAS robotics briefing. Full will be presenting his work on bio-inspired robots.

"What Goldberg has now done is take this lab camera into the field," said Full.

Goldberg and Song recently teamed up with researchers from the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University to help look for the ivory-billed woodpecker, also reverently referred to as the "Lord God bird" or the "Holy Grail of bird-watching." The search throughout the Southeast is being led by U.S. Fish & Wildlife and in the Cache River Refuges of Arkansas by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

The bird, standing 18 to 20 inches tall with a wingspan of 30 to 31 inches, was considered the largest woodpecker north of Mexico when it vanished more than six decades ago. It feasts on beetle larvae that inhabit the dead or dying trees of the bottomland wilderness - or what remains of it - in the southeast United States.

It had been feared extinct for decades until sightings in recent years revived hopes of the species' survival. However, most eyewitness observations of the woodpecker were made while the bird was flying through dense forests, making it difficult to obtain photographic evidence of the sightings. Yet, in 2004, biologists made national news headlines when they captured a few seconds of video of what appears to be an ivory-billed woodpecker.

But those sightings also generated their share of controversy, with skeptics claiming that the fuzzy image in the video, taken by David Luneau, associate professor of electronics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, actually depicted a common look-alike bird, the pileated woodpecker.

Hopes that the ivory-billed woodpecker survived extinction were renewed last September along the Florida Panhandle when another team of scientists from Auburn and Windsor universities reported sightings and retrieved a number of audio recordings of the bird's distinctive double knock. Still, none of the evidence to date has provided the definitive proof of the bird's existence that skeptics demand.

"A single photographic frame would have to clearly show the unique markings of the ivory-billed woodpecker," said Goldberg. "Much better would be a high-resolution video clip that would also capture its unique wing and flight patterns."

The researchers note that simply pointing video cameras at the sky and recording is not practical, as the images would quickly fill up the computer's hard drive. So how are they overcoming this challenge? Read onto the next page for the conclusion...