Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd After John James Audubon

 

Recently, I decided to try and find a portrait of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by John James Audubon that I recalled seeing on display in one of the exhibit halls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City a long time ago. I had no luck finding it again at the museum during periodic visits. However, it turned out that it was easy to locate the portrait online. When I did so, I learned that this curiosity was actually an oil on canvas creation painted by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd around the year 1830 that was fashioned after Audubon's watercolor. The painting is currently on display in Gallery 774 at the museum, a gallery which you can surely find by asking one of the museum personnel for its location.

The museum has information on this piece online, and here is an excerpt:

Audubon made his watercolor of the ivory-bill...before 1826, and commissioned Kidd to copy it and other of his bird subjects in oil for display in a traveling exhibition Audubon planned but never realized. The copyist added the landscape background.

Click here to read more about this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site.

Ivorybill Search: Across the Pascagoula: Otter Pond and Beyond

Brian Carlisle and Chris Carlisle maintain a fantastic site called "Kints" which documents their ongoing search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in southern Mississippi. Kints (or "kents") refers to the common note or call of the Ivorybill. Chris Carlisle recently did a great post describing their search of the Pascagoula Wildlife Management Area. It includes over six dozen photographs, two of which are posted here, with permission.

Reading through the post along with seeing so many beautiful photos of the forest that the Carlisles searched transported me back to the very special times that I found myself lucky enough to be searching for the Ivorybill, starting at dawn, in similarly beautiful forests in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina.

Here's an excerpt from the Carlisle brothers' post that describes the forest:

Beautiful, mature second- and third-growth mixed bottomland hardwood and cypress/tupelo swamp forest, with a path running roughly northeast-southwest.  We decided to follow the path northeastward, and walked through some very nice hardwood forest habitat, with many different types of trees -- swamp chestnut oak, water oak, sycamore, holly, red maple, green ash, magnolia, what I believe to be pignut hickory, and shagbark hickory. 

Read the full post here at Kints

Native American Pipe Stem with Ivory-billed Woodpecker Scalp

Here is an image of a Native American pipe stem circa 1800 - 1825. It features an Ivory-billed Woodpecker scalp that is apparent to the far right, in black and red, just to the left of the two blue bands that are separated by a brown band. The pipe belongs to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ecology at Harvard University. It was loaned out to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a beautiful exhibit entitled The Plains Indians - Artists of Earth and Sky, at the museum, March 9 - May 10, 2015.

The book that accompanies this exhibit explains:

"Attached to the stem is the head and scalp of an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird widely associated with leadership, warfare, and calumet ceremonialism."

Illustration of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by George F. Sandström

Illustration by George F. Sandström, © Delaware Museum of Natural History

Here is a seldom seen, beautiful illustration of a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers that appears on Plate 83 of Woodpeckers of the World by Lester L. Short, published by the Delaware Museum of Natural History (1982).

The book is a comprehensive account of the 198 species in the Picidae family that Short recognized, and it includes a total of 101 plates by artist George F. Sandström that portray these species in their natural colors with exquisite details. As Dean Amadon wrote in the preface:

The success of artist George Sandström's labors will be evident to anyone who leafs through the plates. They permit an efficient comparison of woodpeckers, particularly of closely related species, often grouped on the same or in adjacent plates, from all quarters of the globe; they are an integral part of this treatise.

Plates 79 through 84 depict the 11 species within the Campephilus genus. Eventually, I will post all of the illustrations from those plates here, pursuant to permission obtained from the publisher.

WolframAlpha on Campephilus Woodpeckers

Here is an image from the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) search result from Wolfram Alpha's computational knowledge search engine that details Campephilus taxonomy.

Taxonomic network:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ivory-billed+woodpecker
Source:  Wolfram Alpha LLC.  2010.  Wolfram|Alpha.
(accessed February 20, 2010).

By the way, if you've never entered your birth day, month and year into Wolfram Alpha, you may want to try it out here.

Listen, Look and Watch at the Macaulay Library

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library bills itself as "the world’s premier scientific archive of natural history audio, video, and photographs."  Follow the link below, and you'll be able to search for over thousands of Campephilus woodpecker media files by common or scientific name.

https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/about/

The Macaulay Library contains the notable 10 min, 20 sec length recording of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers drumming, making kents and also other vocalizations all recorded by Arthur A. Allen and his team in April, 1935.  It also contains a 1 min, 40 sec recording of what may be kent calls of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker recorded by John V. Dennis on February 25, 1968 in Texas.

Le Mégapic-Impérial et Le Mégapic à Bec d’Ivoire

Originally posted  2/26/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Illustration courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,

Cornell University Libraries.

   http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ornithology/guide/hillguide16.htm

The magnificent Imperial Woodpecker is depicted in this hand-colored lithograph from French naturalist Alfred Malherbe's four-volume work, Monographie des picidées (1859-1862).  There is another illustration and more information about the work available here at this link.

The largest woodpecker in the world, the female Imperial Woodpecker is shown in full with her tongue extended, contrasted with the male whose crest is red and black.  In the background, male and female Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are depicted in what certainly appears to be an adaptation of John James Audubon's painting of the birds in 1826.

Tim Gallagher on the Imperial Woodpecker

Read a story about the majestic Imperial Woodpecker.

Read the Full Article

Tim Gallagher is editor-in-chief of Living Bird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's quarterly magazine.  He's also the author of the book "The Grail Bird: The Search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" (Houghton Mifflin, July 2005).  For more info on the illustration, see the article or click here.

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

This is the famous painting of 1 male and 2 female Ivory-billed Woodpeckers from John James Audubon's Birds of America.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Specimen at Harvard

Originally posted 2/28/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, originally uploaded by hyperion327

This impressive looking, male Ivory-billed Woodpecker specimen is on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the Onithology Information System (ORNIS) database, a total of 260 North American and 9 Cuban ivorybill specimens collected from March 7, 1844 to December 6, 1935 are housed in North American collections (not including any specimens that are housed in museums in Cuba). Most specimens were collected in Florida in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

The Top 5 holders of ivorybill specimens, according to ORNIS are:

Harvard, MA - 72
The Field Museum, IL - 38
The Smithsonian, DC - 35
American Museum of Natural History, NY - 27
The Academy of Natural Sciences, PA - 20

With regard to collecting any animal that has become endangered or worse, we'll probably never know how many were enough to collect, and how many were excessive.

From the ORNIS site:  

Over 5 million bird specimens are housed in North American collections, documenting the composition, distribution, ecology, and systematics of the world's estimated 10,000-16,000 bird species. Millions of additional observational records are held in diverse data sets. ORNIS addresses the urgent call for increased access to these data in an open and collaborative manner.

Visit ORNIS here.

Photo by hyperion327, posted here under Creative Commons License.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Tim Gallagher Interview, plus a Lament from the Past

Originally posted 3/30/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Tim Gallagher, ornithologist and author of The Grail Bird, relates his famed sighting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas, seven years ago, in a brief portion of this recent podcast by CBC Radio. The interview begins about 6 mins into the podcast.

Go to the interview here.

The illustration at right is from an article entitled The Passing of Birds by Eugene Strong Rolfe which appeared in The Bay State monthly (1900), now in the public domain.  Rolfe's piece contemplates extinct and endangered wildlife at a time of rampant specimen collecting in the USA stating that:  

It is with keen regret that the mind contemplates the total extirpation of types that have heretofore ministered to our necessities or pleasures.  

This interesting albeit sad read can be found starting on page 413 of the monthly (page 430 of the pdf document), available for browsing or free download at Google books. 

Find this edition of the Bay State monthly here

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search - Project Coyote Update

Originally posted 3/18/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

 
In February, I spent just over a week in east-central Louisiana with a couple of good friends in our ongoing search effort (dubbed Project Coyote) for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  Our trip report includes several images of trees of interest and habitat, and a sound file of two possible double knocks that I heard in the field, but which are rather soft in volume on the recording.

Follow this link to find the update posted on March 17, 2011:  Project Coyote Updates

Photo taken in Singer Tract, Louisiana by Arthur A. Allen (April 1935).

Visiting Louisiana in the wintertime usually gives this New Yorker a welcomed break from the cold!  This time, the first half of the trip was frigid, with overnight temperatures in the 20s before it warmed up considerably for the rest of our days there.  I enjoyed meeting a few fellow searchers for the first time over dinner.  Of course, I always feel fortunate to spend time exploring and enjoying the wildlife and scenery of the Louisiana forests.  

On this trip, I saw dozens of armadillos roaming around the forest, rifling through the leaf litter with their long snouts looking for bugs and worms.  They got me curious, and upon returning home, I was surprised to learn that there are around 20 species of armadillos in the Americas!  The Nine-banded Armadillo you see here is the sole species that inhabits the USA.

Find more on armadillos here.

Nine-banded Armadillo originally uploaded by billy3001

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. 

Find the Wikimedia entry here.

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:

SORA

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.

Read the article here.

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers - A Podcast Interview with Ron Rohrbaugh from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Originally posted 2/2/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Many people find the history and biology of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker to be nothing short of fascinating.  You'll either learn or be reminded why this is so by listening to this podcast interview with Ron Rohrbaugh, Acting Director of the Conservation Science Program at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.   Brought to you by The Wilderness Center, part one of the interview is about 20 minutes long, and is available now at about 26 1/2 minutes into Episode 95.  Part two in Episode 96 will be available on Thursday, February 3, 2011.

Click the logo below to find the podcasts.

The photo above by Arthur A. Allen is in the public domain according to Wikimedia Commons.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker - Project Coyote Update

Originally posted 12/15/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Cassell's Book of Birds (1873)

My friend Mark Michaels recently returned from a trip to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker search area in east-central Louisiana that he and other Project Coyote team members have been focusing on over the past year.  

He's posted a trip report on the Project Coyote site, accompanied by several interesting photos, that details his further study of bark scaling characteristics and habitat quality assessments of nearby Wildlife Management Areas.  Follow the link below for the full report.

   Find the report here in pdf format, posted December 14, 2010.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker - Podcast Discussion

Originally posted 10/15/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Mark Bonta of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi delivers very interesting commentary on the continuing search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker along with the Delta blues in a new podcast discussion.  Ivorybill comments begin just after 14 minutes into this podcast:

Geography of the Delta Blues and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker 

I was pleased to discover this illustration, new to me, amid an extensive collection of antique bird illustrations and bird photos.  The collection is available in a web album belonging to Avigraphicon at this link:
 

Avigraphicon's Public Gallery

Avigraphicon provides these notes on the book that this plate belongs to:

Captain Thomas Brown's illustrations following Alexander Wilson and Lucien Bonaparte's seminal text, originally published in the three-volume Jameson edition of the American Ornithology. These plates are from the later "Illustrations" volumes published between 1831 and 1835... Brown expanded the works of Wilson and Bonaparte to include 161 additional birds, and enlarged the illustrations of 87 others. 

Link to the full version of these notes here.

Ghost Birds, by Stephen Lynn Bales

Originally posted 11/17/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

If you're at all curious to know what it's like to successfully search for, find and study the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, then you will enjoy the new book Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935–1941 by Stephen Lynn Bales.  I found it to be a truly fantastic read on so many levels.  


The author has set up a site for the book here:

Ghost Birds 

And, Cyberthrush has written a nice review of the book at Ivory-bills Live.

Read the review at Ivory-bills Live

If you read this at a later date and do not link directly to the review, you can find it in the post dated November 14, 2010 at Ivory-bills Live.

A Pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers - Specimens Photo

Originally posted 10/1/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

ivory bills, originally uploaded by slider5.

This pair of Ivory-billed Woodpecker specimens can be found at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I've been mentioning raised crests frequently, and so I felt intrigued to see the raised crest on the male bird at right in this photo. It's something that you almost never see in ivorybill photos or specimens. I wonder what taxidermy technique was involved in raising the crest.

Many thanks to slider5 for granting permission to post this photo here.

Even more intriguing is a new report from Arkansas of a sighting of a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by Jackson Roe and his dad reported on Jackson's blog!  UPDATE: In a later post, Jackson Roe conveyed that the birds he and his dad saw were Red-headed Woodpeckers, not ivorybills.  Both types of woodpeckers have white patches on their backs.  Their search continues.

Read more here.

Let's all wish them the very best of luck in their future efforts to further document living ivorybills!

Recovery Plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by USFWS

Originally posted 7/18/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Recovery Plan

I thought I'd edit this recent post to announce the release of the Recovery Plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.   The direct link to the report is here:

http://ecos.fws.gov/docs/recovery_plan/100719.pdf

At 168 pages, the report should make for very interesting reading to Ivory-billed Woodpecker, bird and wildlife enthusiasts.  Apparently, you can obtain a hard copy of the report by requesting one from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.


Update
You can find an interesting and thorough discussion of the Recovery Plan over at Ivory-bills Live.  Be sure to read the comments associated with the post at this link, entitled as follows (it's dated July 22, 2010, in case you need that info to find the post):

The Good, the Bad and the Fuzzy...

About the Illustration

The head and bill of a male Ivory-billed Woodpecker appear in this reproduction of a watercolor. The illustration is within the public domain, and it appears in Key to North American Birds, 1903 (5th Edition).  Here is a curious excerpt from that book on the Imperial Woodpecker, and another excerpt on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:

CAMPE'PHILUS.  IVORY-BILLS.  Containing the largest and most magnificent known Woodpeckers, of several species, peculiar to America.  The Imperial Woodpecker, C. Imperialis, comes in Chihuahua within 50 miles of our border, and will no doubt be found in the mountains of S. Arizona or New Mexico.  It is larger than the Ivory-bill, with no white stripe on the next, and black nasal tufts.  It has been attributed to the U.S., but I have never felt at liberty to use the Key on the lock of futurity. 

IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER.  WHITE-BILLED LOGCOCK.  A large powerful bird of the S. Atlantic and Gulf States, formerly N. to No. Carolina along the coast, to the Ohio river in the interior; range restricted of late years, almost coincident with maritime regions, N. and W. only to portions of S. Car., Ga., Ala., Miss., Ark., and very small part of Texas; still locally common in the dark heavily-wooded swamps, but very wild and wary, difficult to secure.  Nests high in the most inaccessible trees; hole deeps, with oval opening; eggs 3-4, 1.35 X 1.00, in an average, varying moderately, somewhat pointed, highly porcellanous; they are laid early, sometimes even in February, oftenest in March, April, and early in May.

 To find the full book, Key to North American Birds, at Google Books, click here.

A New Book

And from that old book to one that's new and upcoming, we have Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935–1941 by Stephen Lynn Bales due out in mid-November.

Here's an excerpt from the book description available at UT Press's site:

Drawing on Tanner’s personal journals and written with the cooperation of his widow, Nancy, Ghost Birds recounts, in fascinating detail, the scientist’s dogged quest for the ivory-bill as he chased down leads in eight southern states.

Read the full book description here!

Newly Found Photos of a Young Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Originally posted 8/23/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

If you'd like to see several newly found photos of a young Ivory-billed Woodpecker, check out a very interesting article by Stephen Lyn Bales at the Smithsonian Magazine site:   

Be sure go to the Photo Gallery at the link below to see the photos! 

A Close Encounter with the Rarest Bird

Stephen Lyn Bales is the author of the upcoming book:

Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941