Friday, February 5, 2010

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Photos by Arthur A. Allen

Originally posted 1/16/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.


Post updated on 2/1/2011 

Wikimedia Commons has posted this photo and a few others of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers at the Singer Tract in Louisiana that were taken by Arthur A. Allen of Cornell University.  This photo is accompanied with the following information at Wikimedia:

...Female Ivory-Bill returning to nest. Photo taken in Singer Tract, Louisiana by Arthur A. Allen (April 1935). From Recent observations of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Auk) Volume 54, Number 2, April, 1937.
  This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 with a copyright notice, and its copyright was not renewed. 


The full-text of the aforementioned article by Arthur A. Allen is easy to find (search using his name in the author field) at the Searchable Ornithological Research Archive (SORA).  The image above and several other interesting images appear in the article.  You can find it here:


Cornell offers more images of the Singer Tract in Louisiana and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in its digital collections.  Some are in color and the images are definitely worth a look.  The entire collection of these images is not easy to retrieve with a single search, so try various keywords like ivorybill, woodpecker, and singer tract and a few searches if you want to find them.


Visit the Cornell University images here.

From past to present, Cornell shares details about a new book being written by leaders of the Cornell Lab’s Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Project and partner organizations in the Autumn 2010 edition of Living Bird Magazine.

Find the Living Bird article here.

Also, Don Ware of the Choctawatchee Audubon Society has conveyed several reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawatchee River in Florida.

4 comments:

Jay said...

Thanks for sharing a nice historical photo,

Bill Benish said...

Sure Jay. Thanks for visiting!

Unknown said...

Hi Bill, I can understand the attraction... and the whole story of the Ivory Bill is just mesmerising, how I wish I could be on one of the expeds to try and re-locate one.

Do you think they are extinct or not?

Bill Benish said...

I believe that while they are very rare birds, yes, they are still living today. My own first-hand experiences in the field especially make me think so along with select reports of relatively recent sightings and some other information. The Project Coyote site details some data collected in our own effort that my search team finds to be most intriguing, though not conclusive, with regard to the persistence of ivorybills in the Louisiana.

The site is here:

http://www.south-run.com/coyote/summary.htm

People will keep trying to document this bird's continued existence. Naturally, I wish anyone who does so the very best of luck!

The podcast that you will find a link to at this post is a great listen with regard to your question:

http://cwoodpeckers.blogspot.com/2010/10/ivory-billed-woodpecker-podcast.html