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.

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.

Early Audubon Drawings & Project Coyote Update

Originally posted 5/13/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

This post may be old news to some of you.  But only recently, I was excited to discover an 1812 illustration of a male and female Ivory-billed Woodpecker by John James Audubon.  The image you see below is one of 116 drawings that appear in Audubon: Early Drawings by Harvard University Press published in 2008.  For more information about the book:

Follow this link

Also, check out a pleasing arrangement of several drawings from the book:

Here at this link

Incidentally, Wikipedia Commons has a large file version of Audubon's more renowned, later drawing of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker from Birds of America.

Find the image here

And in case you haven't heard yet...

On a related note, the Project Coyote site that details the ongoing search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in east central Louisiana was recently updated.  It's a very interesting read.  The update by Mark Michaels focuses on woodpecker anatomy and what it may imply in terms of foraging sign.

Why does it matter? 

Distinguishing Ivory-billed Woodpecker foraging sign from that of other woodpeckers could go a long way toward locating extant populations of this elusive bird.

Find the update here

There are also several photos, including scaling on a live tree, from an earlier update at the Project Coyote site (it's on the same page as the latest update) where Mark M. writes:

This update includes an image of scaling on a live tree (a Nutall oak, we suspect) in our search area.  We've had several requests for close-ups of scaled trees, showing evidence of insect infestation and are providing a number of examples.

And so the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker continues in Louisiana.