Imperial woodpecker1/18/2024 ![]() ![]() Also, there are differences in facial coloration. Note the white saddle of the Ivory-billed, absent in the pileated, and the sexual dimorphism of the crest. Here’s a comparison of both species that I showed when I wrote about the Ivorybill in 2010. These features, and the larger size of the Ivory-billed, distinguish it from a similar species, the pileated woodpecker ( Dryocopus pileatus), the largest woodpecker known to exist in the U.S. Ivorybills also have a distinctive white “saddle” on their back, and white patches on the wings. ![]() Photo: Cornell Lab of OrnithologyĪs you can see from the second photo, one distinctive feature of this bird is the sexual dimorphism in crest color: males have red crests and females black ones. Here’s a photo of a male from Louisiana in 1935, and another, showing both sexes, is colorized below:Ī colorized rendition of a photograph taken by Arthur Allen of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker at a nest in Louisiana’s Singer Tract, 1935. Loss of habitat caused a big popuation decline, and fewer and fewer sightings were made. This magnificent beast, the third largest woodpecker in the world, used to have a fairly broad range across the South, but was limited to wet lowland forests with very old trees. Nevertheless, the authors declared that the bird persists: click on the screenshot to read. This was based on sightings and recordings of calls, but the photographs weren’t that convincing. The paper (click on screenshot below) adduced evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis-thought to have been extinct in the US (and elsewhere) since about 1940 -was actually persisting in wet lowland forests of the South. produced a flurry of ornithological excitement. In 2005, a paper in Science by Fitzpatrick et al. ![]() UPDATE: I have removed the photos from the new paper as the authors have copyrighted them and won’t give me permission to use them. ![]()
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