Vital Lessons for Conservation Hide Behind the "Extant-Extinct" Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Debate
As the scientific debate plays out over the fate of the "extinct" ivory-billed woodpecker, let's enjoy, and work to maintain space for, its plentiful pileated cousin
Please SUBSCRIBE to receive my posts by email.
Various updates - If you've tracked my journalism over the decades you know that I, like many other environment-focused journalists, have written an awful lot about rarity and loss - covering the last few vaquita porpoises of Mexico; the vanished baiji dolphin of China's Yangtze River, the endangered Atlantic sturgeon of my nearby Hudson River; the last croaks of the now-extinct Rabbs' fringe-limbed frog of Central America; and of course the ivory-billed woodpecker, which I wrote about in 2005 and again last weekend after a new study claimed the fabled bird still exists even though it was pronounced extinct last fall by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The 10-scientist, 10-year study study - "Multiple lines of evidence indicate survival of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana" - is not yet peer reviewed, but is being pored over by amateur naturalists and experts as a prepint.
The Guardian published a story by Oliver Millman on the ivory-billed study, including the lead researcher, Steven Latta of the National Aviary, describing an encounter with one of the woodpeckers: “It flew up at an angle and I watched it for about six to eight seconds, which was fairly long for an ivory-billed woodpecker....I was surprised. I was visibly shaking afterwards. You realize you’ve seen something special that very few people had the opportunity to see.”
The ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, was (or is, if this paper's findings hold up) an extraordinary animal that would captivate and cause palpitations even if commonplace. The third largest of the world's 250-plus woodpecker species, it once pecked and fed and flew from Cuba to southern Illinois. It had a unique call and knocking signatures, a distinctive leg and foot structure, and of course splendid black, red and ivory coloration.
It vanished along with mature bottomland forests across the South as development displaced wildness.
The evidence compiled in this paper pointing to the birds' persistence in Louisiana bottomlands is impressive, but there's more than enough room for division. (At times, this arena has seemed almost as fraught and contested as the fight over unidentified flying objects.)
Photos A and D, taken during this study, are of birds the authors say have distinct attributes of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Images B (colorized) and D were taken early in the 20th century and are confirmed to be of this species. (Reproduced with permission)
The decision by the Fish and Wildlife Service to include the ivory-billed woodpecker with 22 other "delisted" species - those taken off the Endangered Species Act because they are gone - will stand a good while longer.
[Addendum, May 11 - To be sure it's crystal clear, the ivory-billed woodpecker is not yet officially declared extinct by the Wildlife Service or removed from the Endangered Species List; review of public comments is still under way. See this agency page for the latest updates. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, keeper of the IUCN Red List, still has the species listed as critically endangered.]
The Service's 2019 peer-reviewed assessment of the species' "recovery plan" is worth a read. That little [X] below is wrenching to look at. One can hope for a surprise, but it's unlikely to be erased.
I predict the debate over the persistence or definitive absence of this splendid and elusive bird will go on for years to come.
None of this means biologists and birders shouldn't keep probing the remaining southern patchwork of mature forests. Kudos to this determined team for their unrelenting fieldwork using an expanding array of tools. Everyone interested in bird and forest conservation in the region should read their statement on the National Aviary website.
A statement from researchers who argue the ivory-billed woodpecker is alive, if not well
This line from the authors is key even if the bird is never formally deemed extant:
"Conservation of large and continuous tracts of bottomland forest, conserved so these areas exhibit old growth forest characteristics, is critical for the Ivory-billed woodpeckers’ population size to improve."
In a post deconstructing the new paper, Jerry A. Coyne, a renowned evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, offered this summation:
"The conclusion is that old chestnut of scientific conclusions: 'More work needs to be done.' But one thing is for sure: this new work (which is ongoing) will make birders think twice about declaring the ivorybill extinct, and will spur new efforts to find it. Of course without a concerted effort to save or increase the habitat (wet bottomland forest), seeing the bird is not the same thing as saving it."
Appreciate the abundant
I want to set aside the ivory-billed debate and switch gears to look at abundance. Rarity attracts us in many ways, and the drama of endings, particularly with villains involved, does as well.
This is how the ecologist Stuart Pimm explained this dynamic to me 22 years ago for a New York Times feature story on the slow, complicated process of extinction:
"There is an extraordinary sense of loss when you see wonderful animals and plants and you know you may be the last people to see them.... It's rather like looking at some old, beloved relative who you know is simply not going to last another year or two. You don't know exactly when old uncle Joe is going to die."
Those stories need telling, but too often they swamp out the importance of examining abundance.
Similarly, while we fixate on war - particularly, and appropriately, right now - we rarely pause to ponder the conditions that foster peace, which is much more than the absence of war.
I have a Columbia colleague, Peter Coleman, who's moved from decades of working in conflict zones to studying countries around the planet that are anomalously peaceful.
I think there are a lot of lessons from the still-nascent Sustaining Peace Project that can be applied in sustaining ecological thriving.
Insert | It's similar to the difference between pursuing public health and practicing medicine. Both are needed but, as the late great public health researcher Kirk Smith told me, doctors "are the failure people." A shift of this sort is starting to happen. There's been an IUCN Red List of threatened species since 1964, but this international organization tracking species' condition worldwide only recently created an IUCN Green List of conserved areas and related work focused on conditions driving species abundance. The more of that kind of balance the better.
Male and female pileated woodpeckers (public domain, via Wikimedia)
A pileated wonder
I was inspired to write on the flip side of woodpecker ecology by a batch of Sustain What readers who sent in photos and video clips of another splendid tree-hammering species, the pileated woodpecker. [Want to know how to prounced pileated? Here’s a fun essay that says the choice is yours!]
Insert, Feb. 26, 2023 - Last September, I had the utter pleasure of watching closeup as a pileated woodpecker gorged on berries here at our home in Maine.
In almost every instance where someone has claimed to see an ivory-billed woodpecker, the species in question turns out to be this abundant cousin, Dryocopus pileatus. There are some 2.6 million of these wonderful tree-excavating birds across North America, averaging just three inches shorter than their vanished ivory-billed kin. According to National Audubon Society models, on average, this woodpecker will do well with climate change, with vast northward expansion of its range even as the species retreats from western, dry mountainous spots. (Explore the simulation on the Society's pileated page.)
They can do well in suburbia as long as communities maintain sufficient mixed woodlands, according to a 2018 paper, "Use of suburban landscapes by the Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus)." The authors, Jorge A. Tomasevic and John M. Marzluff, wrote, "Our results suggest that maintaining forest cover above 20 percent and retaining large deciduous trees and snags in public green spaces and yards may improve the suitability of suburban areas for woodpeckers and the biodiversity that they facilitate."
The pileated woodpecker is an agile and adaptive bird, as Bruce Wilson, a Twitter contact of mine, noted: "Around my parts, pileated woodpeckers nest repeatedly in poles holding up high tension lines that supply electricity to numerous towns across the state. The power company blocks the nest holes, and within a week they've pecked out new entrances."
So take a moment to celebrate abundance, to notice the ordinary, and to work to save room for all kinds of non-human living things wherever you live.
Then think of the effort that has gone into finding any clear evidence of even one ivory-billed woodpecker - with year after year of observations, with drones and trail cameras and hundreds of eBird postings by birdwatchers in southern forests and listening devices probing for the species' signature double knock.
The new paper on the ivory-billed woodpecker represents a heroic human effort, and a profound human failure.
That is why, when I explore the astonishing 1935 films of Arthur E. Allen in the Macaulay Library at Cornell, I get both a sense of wonder and horror:
Explore the full collection here.
Your turn
What other bird species do you see as taken for granted?
Post comments with links to videos or imagery with some of your favorites. My wife, the environmental educator Lisa Mechaley, offered up the black-capped chickadee - because of its comfort level with humans, its cheery call and simple beauty.
I'm a huge fan of the pileated woodpecker but also the American crow, in part for the reasons laid out in my friend Jim Gorman's New York Times video here:
Other voices
Kenn Kaufmann, a birder, naturalist and illustrator, posted a mindblowing map of pileated woodpecker sightings from eBird users and offered this thought on the ivory-billed debate: "I have great respect for those who continue to seek Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. I'd be overjoyed if they found one. But it has been many decades since the species was known to be alive, and a few distant fuzzy pix won't serve as evidence."
Jeff VanderMeer, a novelist best known for his trilogy of terrestrial loss, "The Southern Reach," posted a wonderful image of a pileated woodpecker staring back at him.
Martin Collinson, a British birder
I meant to fit in this really great paper looking at global forest, human and woodpecker trends together: "Gone with the forest: Assessing global woodpecker conservation from land use patterns."
Last laugh
Because we all need a regular chuckle these days amid everything that is unfolding on this turbulent planet, I have to add that the mystery of continued observations of the long-vanished ivory-billed woodpecker could be solved if this confession from my friend the Reverend Billy Talen (of the Church of Stop Shopping) holds up:
"Can I admit something?
"I capture Pileated Woodpeckers when they are young and when they are of age I paint them white in strategical spots and let them go in the Arkansas swamps and then I call flabbergasted Ornithologists anonymously and untraceably...."
Hang in there, everyone.
Help build Sustain What
Any new column needs the help of existing readers. Tell friends what I'm up to by sending an email here or forwarding this introductory post.
Thanks for commenting below.
Send me feedback (including corrections!), tips, ideas here.
Find my social media accounts, books and music in a click here. And please share Sustain What with solution-focused friends and colleagues.
Very excited and happy to be a member!