MONROE, LOUISIANA — The humidity was thick around 5 in the morning as birders in northeastern Louisiana geared up for a search expedition. After a second-straight stormy night, mosquitoes swarmed. We donned our headlamps, grabbed our hiking poles and headed north into the forest.
Leading our pack was Matt Courtman, 61, tall and bearded and a true believer. At the tail end was his friend, Lynn Hightower. Both wore camo to blend into the woods—men turning invisible in pursuit of a grail.
This, indeed, was no ordinary hike: For those in the know, it was a quest generations in the making—and one reasonable observers might describe as unthinkable.
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All was silence except when Courtman warned of sharp logs and poison ivy, noted bear prints or named the rhythmic sounds of birds, one by one, as they woke.
Among them, Courtman hoped, was the creature he’d sought for years. The one whose image decorated virtually every room of his home. The one he’d built an online community to honor. The one he’d moved across the country to pursue:
The US Fish and Wildlife Service last September announced plans to take the grave and unusual step of removing the ivory-billed woodpecker from the endangered species list due to extinction. Thorough scrutiny of “the best scientific and commercial data available, ” the agency told , had determined the bird simply is extinct.
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I know from recent personal experience that the ivory bill is not extinct, ” said Courtman, who claimed he’d encountered it at least twice:
People had searched for decades for traces of North America’s second largest woodpecker, whose population had declined since the 1880s because, researchers say, of excessive hunting, habitat destruction and perhaps the climate crisis. The government’s last accepted sighting of the species was by artist and birder Don Eckelberry in April 1944 in the same area hiked with Courtman on his recent pursuit.
Prior to European settlement, the ivory-billed woodpecker’s habitat covered a wide range of the Southeastern US, spanning from eastern Texas to the Carolinas. But with European settlement came deforestation, which shrunk the bird’s habitat. The last commonly agreed upon sighting was in 1944, in the Tensas River region of Louisana.
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Since then, some compelling—albeit controversial—research had emerged. But officials accepted none of it as indisputable proof. Some even quipped the ivory-billed woodpecker was another Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster.
Declaring the ivory bill extinct, advocates said, would trigger the pullback of measures that preserve its habitat, ironically becoming the nail in the coffin that truly would lead to its disappearance.
Courtman and Hightower search for evidence of the bird. Courtman believes the species exists and is opposed to it being declared extinct.
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The wildlife service insisted there would be “little to no change in the treatment of (ivory bills’) habitats” if they were declared extinct since land acquired for their conservation would still be protected for other species, it told .
Such a declaration could lead to the very thing that might cause the actual extinction of the beloved ivory bill—fragmentation of the magnificent large, unbroken, tracts of bottomland hardwood forests, which the bird relies on to survive. If that habitat was destroyed, ” he said, “the ivory bills would not adapt, and so they'd be doomed to extinction.”
Declaring extinct a species so revered for its elegance and strength could also shatter something perhaps more delicate: the long-held hope of people who have sought the ivory bill despite skeptics’ long glare and nature’s long odds.
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At almost 6 a.m., birds across the old Singer Tract—part of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge where the sewing machine company once sourced wood for its products—chirped in harmonies and knocked the trees. In this bottomland forest of oak, sweet gum and wild pecan, winter and early spring breeding seasons offer the best chance to spot the ivory-billed woodpecker, Courtman said.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt chronicled spotting a few of them here in the early 1900s. And while the ivory bill’s range once stretched from Florida and South Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma, it was here the late Cornell University-educated ornithologist James Tanner in the 1930s gathered the clearest video and images of the majestic creature.
The ivory-billed woodpecker’s divine nickname, per its devotees, echoes the gasps of those lucky enough ever to have seen it swoop into view. It is nearly 2 feet long, with a wingspan of almost 3 feet. And it boasts a gigantic chisel-shaped, ivory-white beak, with a protruding red crest in males and a black crest in females.
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About a mile in, as we reached the hot zone, sunlight started to pour in. Along with the melodic chirps of awakening birds, we heard a powerful, quick drumming sound above us.
To a non-birder’s eye, the pileated and ivory-billed woodpeckers might seem identical. In fact, many reports of ivory-billed woodpecker sightings have been shut down because they turned out to be pileated woodpeckers. Fervent birders usually tell them apart by the color of their wings and their distinct calling and drumming sounds.
The ivory bill produces a quick, double-knock sound with its bill that slowly decrescendos, whereas the pileated makes a loud, slow, deep rolling sound that lasts for roughly three seconds.
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Courtman first got interested in ivory bills as a kid in Monroe, Louisiana. He grew up blocks from a prominent ornithologist, who at 8 let him hold an ivory bill specimen at the Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Science and at 12 listed him as a contributor to his 1974 book, “Louisiana Birds.”
“Matt calls the woods his cathedral, ” whispered Hightower, who admitted he isn’t as well-versed about birds as Courtman. Sitting on a camouflage-printed cushion, Hightower sometimes pulled out a book of birds to try to identify species he saw and heard.
Searching for the ivory-billed woodpecker requires concentration and review. Since the 1944 sighting, the only other “compelling evidence” out there, according to the federal wildlife service, was 2005 research from Cornell’s renowned ornithologist John Fitzpatrick and his associates that claimed ivory bill sightings in eastern Arkansas’ Cache River National Wildlife Refuge.
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Fitzpatrick had launched a series of expeditions there soon after Tim Gallagher, the former editor-in-chief of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, walked into his office the prior year and announced he and colleagues had seen the ivory-billed woodpecker while out on the Cache River.
“A large black-and-white woodpecker with the characteristic color pattern of this species flew across the bayou at close range, ” Gallagher wrote of the encounter.
“As soon as we landed, we took off through the boot-sucking muck and mire of the swamp, climbing up and over fallen trees and through branches, with camcorders in hand and running, ” he wrote in a Cornell news blog in 2005. “Although the bird landed on tree trunks briefly a couple of times, we weren't able to catch up with it or take a video.”
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“After he tells me the story, I said, ‘What are the chances this wasn’t an ivory bill?’ And Tim said, ‘Zero. It was an ivory bill, Fitz, ’” Fitzpatrick recalled to . So, I said, ‘Well, Tim, our lives are about to change.’ And they did.”
Soon, a team of researchers—fully equipped with cameras and audio recorders—went back to the Cache River to try to nab evidence that would prove the ivory bill was still alive. But the task wasn’t easy: This bird is a whiz. Without finding an active roosting site—like Tanner did—birders say it can be near-impossible to document.
Fitzpatrick’s 2005 evidence, published in the journal Science, included audio and video recordings, pixelated visuals and helicopter surveys. The findings were persuasive enough to trigger a large-scale, government-led, five-year survey of the ivory bill’s historical range, with some $2 million spent on survey work.
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An ivory-billed woodpecker is seen in this 1935 photo from a Cornell Lab expedition to the Singer Tract. James Tanner/Cornell Lab of Orinthology
Teams searched and searched. But over that time—and in the years that followed— “no conclusive evidence” of the bird emerged. The dearth highlighted a grim irony: The ivory-billed woodpecker had been among the animals that motivated Congress in 1973 to pass the Endangered Species Act.
Strong evidence of the ivory bill’s survival remained scant as the Trump administration and its allies sought to pare back the landmark law that saved the bald eagle and grizzly bear. And so, even as President Joe Biden pledged to conserve 30% of the country’s lands and water to protect wildlife, the federal government moved last year to delist the ivory bill.
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It's never easy, said Amy Trahan, an endangered species biologist from the federal wildlife service’s Louisiana Ecological Services Office who contributed to a 2019 review report concluding the ivory bill “no longer exists.”
“We're biologists. … Our whole purpose is to recover species, ” she told . “We don't go into this career having to say something's extinct.”
The government removes a species from the endangered and threatened species list for just three reasons: it's recovered so well it no longer needs the law’s protection; new information suggests it isn't threatened; or it's gone extinct. Removal helps the agency “to be good stewards of conservation resources, ” it
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