BOBBY R. HARRISON – Seeking the Ivory Billed Woodpecker
Bobby Harrison is an award-winning nature photographer, speaker, writer, and educator
based in Huntsville, Alabama. Mr. Harrison holds a B.F.A. in Photography from
Andrew’s University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and a M.S. in Media Technology
from Alabama A&M University. After spending 40 years teaching photography he
recently retired as Associate Professor of Photography, and the Director of the Visual
Media Program at Oakwood University.
Mr. Harrison has published more than 100 articles accompanied with his photography in
many of the major birding and natural history magazines in North America such as:
Audubon, Nature’s Best, Natural History, Living Bird, Birder’s World, Wildbird,
National Wildlife, Birds and Blooms, Bird Watcher’s Digest and others. He was a
columnist for WildBird, and Livingbird Magazine for more than a decade, and for the last
12 years, a columnist for Creation Illustrated magazine.
Mr. Harrison’s photographs have won national recognition three times in the prestigious
Nature’s Best Photography contest, In 2018 his photograph of a Snowy egret was
selected as one of the Top 100 images in the National Audubon Society Bird
Photography Contest, and was a Honorable Mention winner in the 2018 Lucie
Foundations, International Photography Awards.
One of Mr. Harrison’s great passions is to document the existence of the rare and elusive
Ivory-billed Woodpecker. His work on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker with colleague Tim
Gallagher, has been featured in the “New York Times Magazine”, and on CBS “60
Minutes”, and in May, 2021 on “CBS Sunday Morning”.
Program Description
Bobby Harrison is perhaps best known for his life-long quest to find the Ivory-billed
Woodpecker, a bird thought by most ornithologists to be extinct. On February 27, 2004
he and colleague Tim Gallagher rediscovered the long thought extinct bird in eastern
Arkansas. Their sighting, the first time since 1944 that two qualified observers had
positively identified an ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States-quickly led to the
largest search ever launched to find a rare bird and ultimately to the announcement in
April, 2005 of the rediscovery of the species.
While there have been many sightings of this bird since 2005, the USFWS made the
decision on September 30, 2022, to place the ivory-bill on a proposal to delist the bird
from endangered to extinct. Mr. Harrison and others have been arduously working to
obtain photographic evidence that the ivory-bill is indeed extant.
In this program Mr. Harrison will present video evidence that he captured during an
Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting on October 17, 2021. This is the same evidence that
Mr. Harrison recently presented to the USFWS on July 18, 2022 as evidence of the
persistence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in our southern forest.