Distribution

Year-Round Range

Figure 1 . Known only from se. U.S. and Cuba. Best sources of historical distributional information are specimens found in museums around the world and writings of colonial naturalists, but see also reviews and discussion in Hasbrouck 1891; Tanner 1942a, 1942b; Garrido and Kirkconnell 2000; and Jackson in press . Hahn (1963) listed basic information for most specimens; Jackson (in press) located a few more. Basic data missing from many existing specimens.

United States. During nineteenth century, recorded from Ohio River in extreme s. Illinois (possible sighting in White Co.; Ridgway 1889), Indiana (Haymond 1869, Butler 1897, Jones 1903), and Ohio (Jones 1903), and N. Carolina north to Fort Macon (Wilson 1811, Coues and Yarrow 1878), west to se. Missouri (Robbins and Easterla 1992), se. Oklahoma (Cooke 1914, Sutton 1967), and e. Texas (Oberholser and Kincaid 1974), and south to the Gulf Coast and Big Cypress Swamp and adjacent areas of s. Florida (Jackson 1996).

Audubon (1842: 214) suggested that “now and then an individual . . . may be accidentally found in Maryland,” but, in spite of mention by several authors who were probably referring to Audubon’s statement, no further evidence of its existence in Maryland has come to light. Although Missouri is rather far north for the species, the American Ornithologists’ Union Check-list Committee alluded to the possibility of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers still existing in s. Missouri in 1931 (Am. Ornithol. Union 1931).

Presence of an Ivory-billed tarsometatarsal bone in an Indian midden at Cahokia, IL, about 193 km north of Ridgway’s report, may extend range of species in w. Illinois (Parmalee 1958). Parmalee (1958) and Wetmore (1943) suggest that skeletal elements other than the widely traded skull and bill likely indicate a bird that died or was killed locally.

The best known, most studied, most recently known breeding population of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the U.S. lived in mature, contiguous bottomland hardwood forest associated with the Tensas River and its tributaries in ne. Louisiana.

Cuba. Distribution summarized by Gundlach (1876, 1893), Barbour (1923, 1943, 1945), Garrido (1985), and Garrido and Kirkconnell (2000). Known only from main island of Cuba, but from dispersed localities and diverse old-growth forest habitats throughout the island.

Not reported.

Continuous fragmentation and decline of populations reported since at least the early 1800s, although no quantitative data on population declines available. Hasbrouck (1891) summarized our knowledge of the species to 1891, including a detailed map of “present” (1880–1891) and past (prior to 1880) distribution, indicating disappearance of species from interior regions and populations then limited to coastal swamp forests.

In 1939, Tanner (1942a, 1942b) estimated that there might have been 22–24 Ivory-billed Woodpeckers remaining in the U.S., with not more than 6–8 birds at any one locality. By 1942, he concluded there were only 3 localities that offered hope for the species: the Singer Tract in ne. Louisiana, bottomlands of the Apalachicola River in n. Florida, and the Big Cypress region of s. Florida (Tanner 1942b).

The following chronology provides a brief summary of our knowledge of the distribution and abundance of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the U.S. and Cuba from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first century. It is not intended to be complete, nor is inclusion of a report here intended to suggest validity—or the exclusion of a report lack of validity. This is a summary of well-documented events leading to the disappearance of the species in the first half of the twentieth century and examples of some of the more credible and/or more widely publicized reports of this species since the 1940s. Some reports from the second half of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century in North America have tantalized the ornithological community and garnered considerable popular press. The amount of press given reports often bears no relationship to the credibility of the evidence. Reports were often followed by “official” dismissal and little or no organized effort to substantiate them, leading to some reluctance to report possible sightings. We can only hope for documentation that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is yet with us.

United States. 1891: Northern and interior populations have disappeared; existing populations limited to coastal swamp forests (Hasbrouck 1891).

1908: “The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is now found outside of Florida, only in Louisiana” (Chapman 1908: 80).

13 Apr 1924: Arthur Allen photographed a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in central Florida, but the birds are later collected (Allen 1924, Allen and Kellogg 1937).

1926: Phillips (1926: 512–513) summarized status of Ivory-billeds, noting “a few in Florida and possibly a few scattered pairs in southern Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.” Specific localities mentioned: Florida—near mouth of Aucilla River, Jefferson Co., and along the Apalachicola River in n. Florida, Royal Palm Hammock in s. Florida in 1917; “must have existed in large numbers near St. Marks up at least to 1905, information that 37 were shot in the Oreilla Swamp”; Georgia—heard in Okefenokee Swamp in 1917, one shot there in 1913; Louisiana—present in Morehouse, W. Carroll, E. Carroll, and Madison parishes in 1904; e. Texas—Liberty and Harding cos. in 1904, one probably killed near San Antonio in 1900. The record of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Royal Palm Hammock of s. Florida was disputed by Bailey (1927).

1920s: Individuals seen near Deer Park, e. Osceola Co., FL (Nicholson 1929).

About 15 Apr 1932. Mason Spencer shot a male in Madison Parish, LA (Bird 1932). This brought the birds along the Tensas River to the attention of the ornithological community and led to the work of Allen, Allen and Kellogg, and Tanner (1942a).

1934–1935: George Melamphy and others recorded nearly 100 sightings along the lower Santee River, SC (Allen and Sprunt 1936, Snyder and Russell 2002).

1937–1939: Tanner did his dissertation work on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, including extensive studies of the birds in the Singer Tract of ne. Louisiana, but also searched much of the U.S. range of the species.

Aug 1941: Three Ivory-billed Woodpeckers seen in John’s Bayou area of the Singer Tract, LA, by George Bick and Jim Parker, including an apparent female hatch-year young (Bick 1942; J. Tanner pers. comm., Oct 1989, an update and annotation of Tanner 1942a).

21, 28 Dec 1941: Tanner found an adult and juvenile female in highly cutover area of the Singer Tract.

9 May 1942: Roger T. Peterson and Bayard Christy observed 2 females in the same area (Christy 1943, Peterson 1948, J. Tanner update pers. comm.).

Nov 1942: John Baker found a single female in the Singer Tract (Peterson 1948).

1941–1942: Two well-described sightings were made in Okefenokee Swamp, GA, but reports remained in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) files until discovered and published in 1991 (Loftin 1991).

Dec 1943–Jan 1944: Richard Pough of National Audubon Society found a single female in the Singer Tract between 4 Dec 1943 and 19 Jan 1944 (Pough 1944).

Apr 1944: Don Eckelberry saw and sketched a female in the Singer Tract (Eckelberry 1961; watercolor painting in collection of J. A. Jackson and reproduced in Jackson 2002).

Dec 1946: Single Ivory-billed Woodpecker may have remained in the Singer Tract (Peterson 1988), although there is apparently neither identification of the observer nor further record of this report.

Dec 1948: Arthur MacMurray, a former student of Tanner’s, visited the Singer Tract and heard rumors of Ivory-billeds, but found none (J. Tanner update pers. comm.).

1949: Reports in s. Missouri as late as 1949 provided tantalizing details of field marks (e.g., Moore 1949), but garnered little attention and no documentation.

1950–1952: Whitney Eastman (1958, Stevenson and Anderson 1994) searched for and reported finding Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Chipola River in Calhoun Co., FL, in 1950–1951. In Apr 1951, John Dennis (1967, 1979: 79) reported hearing an Ivory-billed—”the sound so well described as the tooting of a child’s tin trumpet” near a putative roost tree along the Chipola River in the Florida Panhandle. Tanner visited the Chipola River areas with Robert Porter Allen of National Audubon and could not substantiate the reports.

Jul 1952: Sam Grimes and Roy Hallman reported seeing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Wakulla Co., FL (J. Tanner update pers. comm.).

Apr 1955: John K. Terres reported seeing an Ivory-billed south of Homosassa Springs, FL (Jackson 1989).

1959: William Rhein reported seeing an Ivory-billed 1.6 km west of the Aucilla River in Jefferson Co., FL (J. Tanner update pers. comm.).

1954–1969: Herb Stoddard (1969: 79) wrote that he had seen “three Ivory-bills in the Southeast in the last fifteen years” and that he felt the species had a chance to survive. Dennis (1979: 78) did not know the dates of observations, but reported that Stoddard had seen 1 Ivory-billed Woodpecker clearly from a small plane circling over the lower Altamaha and another (possibly in 1958) “in beetle-killed spruce pine near Thomasville, Georgia.”

1962: The Committee on Bird Protection of the Am. Ornithol. Union (Cottam et al. 1962) suggested the possibility of there being one Ivory-billed Woodpecker in S. Carolina and up to 5 in e. Texas.

Apr 1966: Ivory-billed Woodpecker reportedly seen by Olga Hooks Lloyd in the Neches River swamp near Steinhagen Reservoir in e. Texas (Dennis 1979).

28 Aug 1966: Bedford P. Brown, Jr., and Jeffrey R. Sanders reported watching 2 Ivory-billed Woodpeckers scaling beetle-killed pines for 16 min along the fringes of Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle (Dennis 1979).

10 Dec 1966: Dennis (1979) reported seeing an Ivory-billed in the Neches River swamp, e. Texas.

Apr 1967–Apr 1969: On 16 Apr 1967, H. Norton Agey, George Heinzmann, and others saw what they believed were 2 Ivory-billed Woodpeckers on a ranch in Polk Co., FL, northwest of Lake Okeechobee (Agey and Heinzmann 1971a, 1971b; Dennis 1979). On 21 Apr 1968, they retrieved small dark feathers from a downed cavity and a white feather, which was identified by Alexander Wetmore as the innermost secondary of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Agey and Heinzmann 1971a, 1971b). The feathers and Wetmore’s letter are in the collections at the University of Florida Museum of Natural History. Agey and Heinzmann claimed to have seen Ivory-billeds several times through 2 Mar 1969 and to have last heard one there on 14 Jun 1969 (Agey and Heinzmann 1971a, 1971b).

25 Feb 1968: Dennis (1979) recorded what he believed was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Neches River swamp near Village Creek in e. Texas. Hardy (1975) analyzed the recording and concluded that the call was either of an Ivory-billed or a Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata).

22 May 1971: An unidentified dog trainer photographed a pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers on separate tree trunks in second-growth forest in the Atchafalaya Basin, Louisiana. The photos were given to George Lowery at Louisiana State University (LSU), who followed up with searches in the area. He found no conclusive evidence of Ivory-billeds. I have examined the photos and concur with Gauthreaux (1971: 827) and Stewart (1971: 868) that they are clearly of 1 or 2 Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. However, the photos were shown to ornithologists at the 1971 Am. Ornithol. Union meeting at LSU and met with skepticism, the suggestion being that they might be of a mounted specimen.

11 Nov 1974: Robert Bean reported seeing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker from a distance of about 5 m as it flew across Interstate 10 in the Atchafa-laya Swamp about 32 km west of Baton Rouge, LA (Dennis 1979), near where Robert Hamilton thought he had seen one 2 yr earlier (Hamilton 1975).

22–23 May 1976: On 22 May, William Mounsey (pers. comm., Jackson in press) and others reported seeing a male Ivory-billed Woodpecker in flight near the Steinhagen Reservoir, Neches River swamp, TX; on 23 May, a member of their party saw an Ivory-billed “7 to 9 miles [11–14.5 km] away” from this location.

1 Apr 1999: David Kulivan reported seeing 2 Ivory-billeds in the Pearl River Swamp of se. Louisiana (Williams 2001, Jackson 2002).

Jan–Mar 2002: Efforts by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in conjunction with the Zeiss Optical Company’s search, provided evidence that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers might remain the Pearl River Swamp in se. Louisiana. In late Jan 2002, Cornell researchers installed 12 acoustic recording units in good habitat within the Honey I. Swamp area of the lower Pearl River. These sound-activated recorders were left in place through mid-Mar, then retrieved, and the sounds that had been recorded compared against the acoustic signatures of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker calls recorded by Arthur Allen. None of the sounds recorded was that of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Furthermore, the technology provided clear evidence that the mysterious loud “bams” recorded by Martjan Lammertink and heard by other members of the Ivory-bill search team were gunshots (Fitzpatrick 2002). The positive results of this search were that a credible scientific effort was made, a strong conservation message about the values of old-growth bottomland hardwood forests reached a broad public audience, and a technique has been developed that could greatly facilitate future searches and enhance the potential of detecting this or other rare species.

Cuba. 1876–1893: Gundlach (1876, 1893; also cited in Garrido 1985) reported that the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker was declining rapidly.

1920s: Ivory-billed Woodpeckers seen by Swedish botanist E. L. Ekman in the pine forests of Mayar, Holguin Province, e. Cuba (Barbour 1943).

1943: Ivory-billed recently shot “to pieces” at Laguna de Piedras, near Artemisa, Pinar del Río Province, w. Cuba; “the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker is virtually extinct” (Barbour 1943: 86).

1945: Barbour (1945: 165) reported that “there is a chance that the Cuban Ivory-billed may exist in a remote mountain range in the northeastern part of the island in considerable numbers.”

Spring 1948: John Dennis and Davis Crompton found and photographed nesting Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in e. Cuba (Dennis 1948, Crompton 1950).

Spring and summer 1956: Following 3 mo of fieldwork, Lamb (1957) estimated 6 pairs of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers remained in e. Cuba.

Feb 1968: An Ivory-billed Woodpecker seen 7 km north of Cupeyal along the road to Moa in ne. Cuba by Garrido (1975).

1974: O. Garrido (pers. comm. in Dennis 1979) estimated that no more than 6–8 pairs existed in Cuba in 1974.

1981: A pair of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers said to remain near La Melba, ne. Cuba (E. Morton in Norton 1981).

1985: Lester Short, George Reynard, and Giraldo Alayón visited the Cupeyal reserve west of the 1956 sightings and found fresh bark scaling they attributed to Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Short 1985).

1986: Alberto Estrada, Giraldo Alayón, Lester Short, Jennifer Horne, and George Reynard ob-served Ivory-billeds in the Ojito de Agua area in ne. Cuba (Short and Horne 1986, Reynard 1987, Short 1988).

1987: Short, Horne, JAJ, and several Cuban colleagues spent 1 d in the Ojito de Agua area and observed scaling, but none seemed fresh.

Mar 1988: JAJ, Ted Parker, Bates Littlehales, Bill Curtsinger, Hiram Gonzalez, Pedro Rosabal, Giraldo Alayón, and others spent 4 wk in the Ojito de Agua area; JAJ had a glimpse of a bird that he believed was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the vicinity of sightings in 1987 (Jackson 1991a), and the characteristic call notes of the Ivory-billed were heard on 8 different days by several group members. Jackson saw Ivory-billed-sized black-and-white bird for <5 s as it passed a forest opening at about 10 m with wings folded back in the characteristic glide of a woodpecker.

1991–1992: In 1991, John W. McNeely and Pitar Miranda got a glimpse of an Ivory-billed near the confluence of the Yarey and Jaguani rivers in ne. Cuba, and in early 1992 they saw fresh scaling activity in the region, but no birds (J. W. McNeely pers. comm., 17 Apr 1992). Lammertink (1992) spent 44 d in the Ojito de Agua area of ne. Cuba, where birds had been seen and heard 1986–1988; he found no evidence of Ivory-billeds.

1995: Ivory-billed Woodpecker “almost certainly extinct” (Lammertink 1995, Lammertink and Estrada 1995).

The “fossil” record for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker includes considerable skeletal material of recent origin found in association with excavation of archaeological sites. Among these are sites in Illinois (Parmalee 1958), Ohio (Wetmore 1943, Goslin 1945), W. Virginia (Parmalee 1967), and Georgia (Van der Schalie and Parmalee 1960). Considering the prominent trade in Ivory-billed Woodpecker bills among Native Americans (e.g., Catesby 1731, Jackson in press), the presence of Ivory-billed mater-ial associated with archaeological sites outside of se. U.S. and Cuba cannot be taken as indicating a broader range for the species.

How did this species come to be in the se. U.S. and Cuba? Presumably its ancestors arrived from n. South America or Central America, since these are the regions where Campephilus woodpeckers are most abundant. Two routes of arrival within the modern range of Ivory-billeds seem possible: through n. Mexico and around the Gulf Coast to the southeastern states and then to Cuba, or from the Yucatán Peninsula to Cuba, and then to the south-eastern states.

Good evidence supports the notion that ancestral Ivory-billed Woodpeckers may have come through Mexico and across the Gulf Coast region of Texas to the se. U.S. and then from Florida to Cuba. During Pleistocene ice ages, sw. U.S. was much wetter and supported forests where today we find desert. Brodkorb (1970, 1971) described a fossil Ivory-billed relative, Campephilus dalquesti, from Scurry Co., northwest of Abilene in w. Texas, where it lived during the Upper Pliocene perhaps 4 million yr ago. Lowered sea levels during the peak of Pleistocene glaciation meant that peninsular Florida extended much closer to Cuba, thus facilitating dispersal of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers across the Flor-ida Straits (Jackson 1991b).

Lowered sea levels during Pleistocene glaciation would also have brought the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico closer to Cuba, facilitating movement of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers from Mexico to Cuba to Florida. This is a puzzle that may never truly be answered, but one worthy of further investigation.

There is a third possibility. Early explorers noted a considerable trade in live birds between peoples of Cuba and peninsular Florida (Jackson 2004). Perhaps Ivory-billeds were introduced to Cuba sometime before the arrival of Columbus in the New World. Native Americans placed great value on these woodpeckers. If any were taken captive and kept alive, their powerful bills would certainly have facilitated escape.