Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers Evades Extinction, Sighting Reported 8 Decades After Absence in Louisiana

After being absent for nearly eight decades, the reported sighting of ivory-billed woodpeckers in Louisiana is evidence that they have not gone extinct.

Researchers reported seeing ivory-billed woodpeckers flying in a Louisiana forest on Thursday as officials announced they will make a final determination on the status of the birds this year.

Nearly 80 years after the last confirmed sightings in Louisiana, the images-grainy and captured from a distance by drones and trail cameras-offer intriguing evidence the big woodpecker may still exist.

According to several scientists, it strengthens earlier signs of their survival. They demanded that the government renounce its current plan to write off the so-called Lord God Bird, which got its moniker from an exclamation some viewers made when they first saw one.

Sighting Skeptics

Others, however, have criticized the new findings as being inconclusive. One expert, for example, claimed that some of the footage clearly shows a different species of woodpecker that many amateurs mistake for the ivory-billed.

The crew behind the peer-reviewed study published in Ecology and Evolution has been looking for the woodpeckers at an undisclosed location for more than ten years.

It contains recent drone footage from October that reveals a pair of birds with black-and-white markings on their wings that, according to researchers, make them easy to identify as ivory-billed woodpeckers.

According to Mark Michaels, the last time a pair of the rare bird species was photographed was in the 1930s, so this is very extraordinary. Michaels works for Project Principalis, which funded the research and declared that federal wildlife officials had been informed about it.

As per Michaels and lead study author Steven Latta of the independent National Aviary in Pittsburgh, the researchers also recorded the woodpeckers' sounds, and the majority of the search team had some sort of close experience with them, either by seeing or hearing them.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

With a 30-inch wingspan and a cry resembling a bicycle bulb, an ivory-billed woodpecker would appear impossible to miss. However, the bird prefers deep woodlands, which can be challenging for humans to explore. The most recent confirmed sighting occurred in 1944, and many of those places were logged in the early 20th century.

Over the years, there have been several reports of sightings. There was still some uncertainty, and government officials said in 2021 that there was no concrete proof of the continued existence of the rare bird.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service postponed the impending extinction proclamation after Project Principalis announced preliminary findings from its research last year so it could gather more public feedback.

Federal officials seek images or films that can be endorsed by all specialists. The Wildlife Service will receive information on any animal at any time, according to spokesman Christine Schuldheisz.

Co-authors of the paper include one who works for the wildlife service. The research was disclaimed as not necessarily reflect the opinions of the agency.

Prior search efforts have cost millions of dollars.

According to John Fitzpatrick, a Cornell University Professor, who participated in a years-long hunt conducted in Arkansas two decades ago, the most recent recordings and images, when combined with earlier sightings, provide sufficient justification to scrap the proposed extinction of the species, FOX News reports.

The films, according to Michael Collins, a Naval Research Laboratory scientist, show the ivory-billed woodpecker, not the related but smaller pileated woodpecker. Collins claims to have personally seen ivory-billed woodpeckers in the past ten years in the Pearl River area near the Louisiana-Mississippi boundary and has written multiple studies on the subject, Phys Org reports.