Bedford Audubon Society

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Twentieth Century
By Robert Keyes

The status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker at the end of the nineteenth century was summarized by F. M. Chapman (1895) of the American Museum of Natural History: “Formerly South Atlantic and Gulf States, from North Carolina to Texas, north in the Mississippi Valley to Missouri, southern Illinois and southern Indiana. Now restricted to the Gulf states and the lower Mississippi Valley, where only locally distributed.” And: “[Their] home is in the almost limitless cypress forests of our southern coasts and river valleys. Even there it is common in but few locations.”

Logging of the southern forests began in the late nineteenth century and initiated the rapid decline in the population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Tanner). Already in 1917 the massive compendium Birds of America said “now extirpated over much of the greater portion of its former range.” In the page devoted to the Ivory-bill, ornithologist T. Gilbert Pearson was moved to write “Unfortunately for us today it must be numbered among those species of which” we speak as being “nearly extinct” and “so far as the average man is concerned, the bird has already gone to join the Dodo and the Great Auk.” Professor A. A. Allen of Cornell University (Laboratory of Ornithology) echoed this view in 1930 by stating that “the Heath Hen, the Eskimo Curlew, the Whooping Crane, the Trumpeter Swan, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker” would soon follow the Great Auk, the Labrador Duck, and the Passenger Pigeon into oblivion (Allen, 1930).

In 1937 James Tanner received a fellowship that the National Audubon Society had established for the study of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. He spent three years, 1937-1939, searching for and studying the bird, visiting 45 possible sites, and reported the result of his studies in a short book (Tanner, 1942). Tanner reported that in 1926 naturalists knew of no living Ivory-bills and many believed it extinct, but he found a few of the birds living in Louisiana in 1932. The “Singer tract,” described as “the largest and best tract of virgin timber in the Mississippi delta,” was apparently Tanner’s favorite study area and the source of many of his observations concerning the life of the species. He concluded that there were 22 living Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in 1939. Their range was restricted by their feeding habits, their food being almost exclusively wood-boring beetles found under the bark of newly dead trees. The possession of large chisel-like bills suited this diet well by enabling them to easily strip the bark from large trees to access the beetles beneath. After this resurrection of the Ivory-bill, the beginning of the World War in 1939 diverted attention elsewhere.

In that time, as now, many Ivory-bill reports turned out to be Pileated Woodpeckers, leading Tanner to travel in vain to a number of places. Although authors and journalists writing of recent events have eagerly appropriated the name “Lord God Bird” for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Birds of America regards that phrase as a name of the Pileated Woodpecker and Tanner found it to be a local name for the Pileated. Tanner states that Pileated and Ivory-billed woodpeckers may coexist because of their differing feeding habits: Pileated Woodpeckers dig deeply into trees for their favorite borers. Areas of trees stripped of bark were regarded as a sign of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

Reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers appeared sporadically after the war, through the remainder of the century, but none were widely accepted. Pocket size field guides became our favorite sources of information regarding birds and had differing views of the Ivory-bill. There are too many for an exhaustive list. Pough, in 1946, tells the reader that “Destruction of the vast forests of the south has apparently doomed this splendid bird.” Peterson, in 1947' described the bird as “close to extinction” and added, “last reported from the Singer tract.” The Golden Press guides in 1976 and in 1983 (Robbins et al.) say “On the verge of extinction.” “Last reported from” followed by a list of places. James Bond (1961) reported that “a few pairs still exist in or near pinelands of the Sierra de Moa,” Oriente province [Cuba].” The Peterson series of field guides kept the bird through the latest 2002 edition (Peterson and Peterson) but it is absent from those of Kenn Kaufman and David Sibley.

Seventy-five years after Allen forecast their extinction, the Whooping Crane and the Trumpeter Swan survive as species. What about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker? Everyone has heard of the recent discovery of the Ivory-bill in the swamps of Arkansas, although not everyone is convinced of its reality. However, bringing a species back from the brink is not easy. The number of Whooping Cranes alive was around 20 in 1940 when serious recovery efforts began. Today there are 400. That means the population has increased at an average rate of 5% per year, 14 years for a doubling, and this with a large, well-funded effort. Yet even 400 birds does not really guarantee the survival of a species. The numbers for Trumpeter Swans are not much better, recovery from 60 birds to a few thousand in a couple of human generations. It is hard to guess the future of the Ivory-bill without an estimate of the remaining population but it is clear that if it has indeed survived another massive effort will be needed. Will the nation be willing to make it?

REFERENCES

Allen, A. A., The Book of Bird Life, Van Nostrand, 1930
Birds of America, ed. T. Gilbert Pearson, Garden City Books, 1917
Bond, James, Birds of the West Indies, Houghton Mifflin, 1961
Chapman, F. M., Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, D. Appleton & Co., 1895
Peterson, Roger T., A Field Guide to the Birds, Houghton Mifflin, 1947
Peterson, R. T. and Peterson, V., A Field Guide to the Birds, Houghton Mifflin, 2002
Pough, Richard H., Audubon Land Bird Guide, Doubleday, 1946
Robbins, C. S., Bruun, B., and Zim, H., Birds of North America, Golden Press, 1966, 1983
Sibley, David A., Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
Tanner, James T., The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, National Audubon Society, 1942, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1963 and 2003)

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