An artistic view of a male Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Tomasz Cofta.
Drawing on years of field research, a team of biologists has revealed trail camera photos and drone videos that show the consistent presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers at their study site within extremely remote swampy forests in Louisiana. Their evidence also indicates repeated re-use of foraging sites and core habitat. Declared “extinct” last year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, this new information is revealing and offers hope that a few Ivory-billed Woodpeckers still exist in bottomland hardwood forests in Louisiana.
Led by Steve Latta, the director of conservation at the National Aviary, each of the team of field researchers observed at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker and periodically heard their calls while investigating the area. According to reporting by The Guardian, Latta himself saw an Ivory-billed Woodpecker fly upward in front of him, showing the distinctive white edges to its wings. “It flew up at an angle and I watched it for about 6 to 8 seconds, which was fairly long for an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting,” he revealed. “I was surprised. I was visibly shaking afterwards. You realize you’ve seen something special that very few people have had the opportunity to see.”
The insight that Latta considered 6 to 8 seconds as a fairly long sighting underlines the reason why it has been all but impossible to get a photograph of an Ivory-bill during any of the extremely rare sightings during recent decades.
As a result, the use of trail cameras have proved to be invaluable in taking remote photographs of apparent Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to date.
According to the researchers’ as yet unpublished manuscript, the team’s most important series of trail camera photos followed a sighting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker landing about 40 yards away in a live but declining sweetgum tree October 27, 2019. Trail cameras have been deployed almost continuously to photograph activity at this tree since then, subsequently taking photos of Ivory-bills visiting the tree intermittently from at least November 29, 2019 to February 10, 2020, and then again from September 12, 2021 to December 2021. Trail camera photos that were taken November 30, 2019 and October 1, 2021 at this tree and a nearby tree, each show a bird has a white “saddle” on the lower part of its folded wings.
Another trail camera photo offers additional clues: On January 9, 2020 an apparent male and female pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers was photographed, and this image shows one bird with an apparent red crest (the male), another with an apparent black crest (the female), and it shows the male has a prominent white wing “saddle.” Also, a photo sequence that researchers find most compelling was taken November 30, 2019 of what appears to be a foraging family group of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers with 3 woodpeckers moving and foraging together on a tree.
Overall, the researchers point to the multiple images and videos that show Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, based on the appearance of broad white “saddles” on their wings, white trailing edges on the wings of birds in flight, a white stripe along the side of the neck, the large size of the woodpeckers, their heavy light-colored bill, the unique morphology of their legs and feet, and the pair of birds with red (male) and black (female) crests.
The size and markings of the birds photographed is strong evidence that they are not another species of woodpecker, such as a Pileated Woodpecker or Red-headed Woodpecker, Latta said. “It reinforced to me that, yes, this bird does exist and it left me feeling a sense of responsibility to protect the species for the future.” Field studies continue and they may well produce more and better evidence of a small number of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in a remote tract of Louisiana.
