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Last Call

Bird Loss and the Threat of Extinction

Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Male and female Ivory-billed Woodpeckers illustration from "The Natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands Vol .I "
Largest White Bill’d Woodpecker (T. 16)
Illustration in "The Natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands" Vol .I (1771) by Mark Catesby

Cornell University has had a long history with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the largest woodpecker to have lived in the United States.

This massive bird, which Audubon dubbed the "great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe,” inhabited bottomland hardwood forests, where it relied on large trees for nesting. Heavy logging of those forests reduced habitat for these woodpeckers, and by the mid-1930s, the only known population was found in Louisiana.

Recognizing that this bird was on the brink, Arthur Allen, founder of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, mounted an expedition to a large patch of old-growth hardwood forest in Louisiana. Allen’s group discovered a breeding pair of the birds, and they collected audio and film recordings of the pair at their nest.

These were the first recordings made of the species. Were they also the last?

Cornell ornithologist Peter P. Kellogg capturing the sounds in an old-fashioned covered wagon during the Lab of Ornithology’s 1935 Louisiana expedition.
Cornell ornithologist Peter P. Kellogg capturing sound in an old-fashioned covered wagon during the Lab of Ornithology’s 1935 Louisiana expedition.

After extensive surveys, Cornell Ph.D. student James Tanner estimated that there were likely fewer than 30 of these birds remaining in the US. Heavy logging pressure continued, and the last universally accepted sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was in 1944.

Rumors and unverified sightings persisted however, and some felt that the bird continued to exist in swamp forests that were difficult to access.

That’s where Cornell comes in again. Following up on reported sightings, in 2004 the Cornell Lab mounted an expedition to find conclusive evidence. The expedition yielded several purported sightings, some audio recordings of their calls, and a four-second video of a large woodpecker flying away. After extensive analyses, the Cornell team concluded that the species persisted.

Many experts remained unconvinced, arguing that the audio and video recordings could easily be of another large–but common–bird, the Pileated Woodpecker. Additional reports and blurry photos emerged from other remote locations, as well as rumors of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in remote regions of Cuba, but no definitive proof emerged. Consensus shifted.

As conservation biologist Chris Elphick put it in a 2023 New York Times article, “If there's really a population out there, it's inconceivable to me that no one could get a good picture."

The film above shows two Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, a male and a female, at their nest cavity, and was captured during the 1935 Lab of Ornithology expedition to Louisiana.

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