The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Is Officially Extinct

The Fish and Wildlife Service has called the game. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is extinct.

Well, my friends, the referee’s whistle has been a long time coming. The slow-rolling deliberate killing of this bird in the 1930s and ’40s is a terrible story of human greed — and a very well-documented one.

The last stronghold of the species was a tract of land in Louisiana on the Tensas River called the Singer Tract, after the sewing machine company that owned it. Beginning in 1937, a young doctoral student, James Tanner, spent years photographing the bird’s last days here. Everybody knew it was the bird’s last days because the sewing machine company sold the land to a logging company.

Only money matters. Why should a woodpecker have a tree, if a tree can be turned into money?

In 1944, warned that the death of the species was weeks away, artist Don Eckelberry raced against time to finish the final painting of the final bird. He witnessed the logging of the last trees used by the last bird.

Can you imagine the horror? For an artist — a professional bird artist — to be asked to witness such a thing?

And why log every tree? James Tanner and others presented a plan to protect portions of the reserve, the only remaining tract where the birds survived. President Roosevelt, the President of the Audubon Society, and four southern governors, including the governor of Louisiana, offered the company $200,000 to set aside land for the birds.

The logging company did it anyway. Why? If they were extorting the nation for money, achievement unlocked. Apparently, they wanted something beyond money. Power? The sick thrill of getting away with something even against the will of presidents and governors, of scientists and artists?

Who knows? I don’t think anyone does, at least not anyone living today.

By the 1930s, the Migratory Bird Act of 1918 had been the law of the land for quite some time. So how could a private business working for private pockets be allowed to destroy an entire species of birds? Why wasn’t the logging company shut down, its board of directors arrested? If they wouldn’t be bought off, why not force them to put down their saws?

After all, the murder of this species wasn’t done in a night or in secret. It was done openly, in public, over a period of years, and under protest.

You may ask, but I can’t answer, because I don’t know.

And so the species died in 1944. But the paperwork lived on.

For most of my life, a species couldn’t be declared extinct until 50 years after the last one was seen in the wild. Therefore, one might have expected the species to be declared extinct in the 1990s.

Well. It’s a funny thing about the human mind. We have a gift for denial that other species lack. We refuse to accept finality.

A few evil men couldn’t have been allowed to tell the scientists, and the nature lovers, and the artists — and the birds — that their lives didn’t matter, that beauty didn’t matter, that there is no value higher than selling things for money. And then when the ransom was collected, those evil men couldn’t have been allowed to laugh and say, “Oh, we were just joking, we do what we want with our property. There is nothing you can pay us to stop us from taking these trees.”

Such an awful story cannot be true. What would it say about human nature if it was?

No, it couldn’t be. And so it wasn’t.

For decades, people claimed they saw the bird: The Ivory-bill Returns!

In the spring of 2005, several people I would normally expect to be able to identify a bird claimed they saw — claimed they’d videotaped — an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Their claims were reported in a respected journal. Their video was televised everywhere.

If you saw the video when it was floating around, perhaps you felt as I did. No matter how large I blew up the image on a monitor — and we already had good-sized monitors in 2005, don’t you worry about that — I couldn’t make that bird into an Ivory-bill.

Well, who wants to be the nagging voice of negativity? I kept my mouth shut. A lot of people did. In time, of course, most people mumbled away whatever mass hysteria had caused them to publish claims of seeing the Ivory-bill in our century.

And now Fish and Wildlife has decided to pull the plug on the fantasy.

It’s over. It’s been over for a very long time. It’s time to admit it’s over.

In the last years of its life, the Ivory-bill was watched, photographed, filmed, painted — all the time under sentence of death. It didn’t slip away in the night. It wasn’t the object of a long desperate search in some mysterious land where people never went. Everyone knew where it was, and the scientists and the artists were given a short time to document its passing, but then the death warrant was carried out.

No one returns from death. In myth, perhaps, but birds live in reality.

For all my life, I’ve known this terrible story. Sometimes, I’ve believed it. Sometimes, I’ve not wanted to. Believe or not believe, the bird has been extinct all the same.

But some people will never believe in its extinction. Some people will always keep searching.

Such terrible things can’t be true. They just can’t be.

Sometimes, I envy those people. What does life look like when terrible things can never be true?

Author's Afterword

My feature image is a detail from John Jay Audubon's famous painting of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers from Birds of America (1827), now in the public domain.

If you're interested in endangered species coverage and want to see more stories like this one, let me know by gently tapping that little <3 button. Tips are always appreciated.

I cover success stories too. One of my favorite stories-- and a reader's favorite on Vocal-- dives into the rediscovery of the critically endangered Blue-throated Macaw, a Bolivian endemic that I was lucky enough to encounter a few years back. You can read it here. Includes my personal photographs of these special birds.

This story was previously published on a different platform. I have updated the illustrations for this version.