No one will believe this, but I have an eye witness other than myself. My mother and I stood in the back door of this suburban house in Center Point this morning and watched a male ivory-billed woodpecker feed on a redbud tree in the back yard for about 20 minutes. I grabbed the binoculars in the kitchen and got a great look at it. There are markings on the tree to prove it.

I don't think there is any way it was a pileated woodpecker. I've never seen a pileated woodpecker anywhere around these parts. We have flickers, red-headed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers in the little buffer areas of woods around the houses between the larger patches of forest over by Jefferson State Community College and points north toward Blount County.

The reason I know it was an ivory-bill? It was huge, for starters, larger than a pileated woodpecker. The red plummage on its head was very pronounced and large and the red streak did not continue below the beak. It's beak was longer, thinner and lighter in color, almost yellow, than the pileated's beak, which appears gray. It had less white around the eyes than the pileated, mostly black really, unlike the pileated in the picture included here to the left.

When I tried to sneak out on the screened in porch and into the backyard to take a picture, it flew away and I could clearly see white patches on the bottom, back edge of the wings.

When I first saw it, I thought for sure it was a pileated woodpecker, because the back was mostly black. Upon closer inspection through the binoculars, you could see a couple of small patches of white on each side, like feathers sticking out on its lower back. That is the only thing that makes me doubt this was an ivory-bill. But it was very skittish and took off immediately after becoming aware of me and left the area.

I guess that meditation to the goddess out by the waterfall on the Locust Fork River Saturday was rewarded.

What I saw in flight this morning looked like the male in this painting (right). I think I even said, "Lawd God."

Wish I had a digital camera with a telephoto lens. I would have had a photo to prove this sighting.

I spent a day in February, 2002, looking for the ivory-bill in the swamps of the Pearl River Basin in Louisiana with no luck. We saw a number of pileated woodpeckers that day. I wrote this story about it for the Dallas Morning News.

But as confirmation, I showed my mother a number of photos of ivory-bills and pileated woodpeckers, and she confirmed the details.

This is an amazing sighting, especially since Jefferson County is not technically in the ivory-bill's mapped out habitat.

The only thing I can conclude is the woodpeckers have been pushed north and east by over development and global warming.

There has been an ongoing controversy about the ivory-bill. A group of researchers were prepared last month to question the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker supposedly spotted in the Big Woods of Arkansas last year. They were prepared to say blurry videotape of a bird in flight wasn't enough evidence. But they changed their minds after hearing recordings from the wild, according to this report from the Associated Press.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a great Web site about this. So too does The Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society.

I'm went out and bought a Nikon Coolpix for under $250, in case the ivory-bill comes back again in the morning.

On Monday, we watched a red-tailed hawk tangle with a squirrel, and the squirrel won.