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| Photo: © |
The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was once found
in virgin bottomland forests throughout the southeastern U.S.,
reaching as far north as southern Illinois, along the Ohio
River. A second population was found in mature upland pine
forests in Cuba. The preferred food of the Ivory-billed was
beetle larvae which it located by stripping the bark from
recently dead trees. Human exploitation of the swamp forests
of the South led gradually to increased fragmentation of the
bird’s habitat and the ultimate decline of its populations.
Its numbers were further decimated by hunters who shot the
birds for scientific collections, even into the 20th Century.
By 1939, James Tanner, the leading researcher
on the bird, estimated there might be 22-24 individuals remaining
in the U.S. Through the years since Tanner photographed the
bird on the Singer Tract in 1942, there have been scattered
reports of the bird from Texas and Louisiana, often met with
skepticism; in 1999 a reliable observer reported seeing two
in the Pearl River Swamp of southeastern Louisiana, but a
subsequent expedition by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology
in cooperation with Zeiss Optical Company, involving installing
12 acoustical recording units in good habitat in the area,
failed to find evidence of the bird.
In Cuba a bird was glimpsed in 1991, but
by 1995 a researcher who spent time in the area stated that
the bird “was almost certainly extinct.” However
in April 2005 the announcement of the rediscovery of the bird
at the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas stunned
conservationists and the general public alike. At present
only the existence of a single bird has been documented.
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