The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Extinct, Rediscovered, or Both?

Photo: Unsplash (free-use license).

The ivory-billed woodpecker has been missing for so long, and rediscovered so often, that the science of how to declare a species extinct has been partly rewritten around it. Below: what we actually know in 2026, why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2021 extinction proposal was withdrawn, and where the long, strange story of Campephilus principalis stands now.

The basic facts

The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is — or was — the largest woodpecker species north of Mexico, and one of the largest in the world. About 50 cm long, with a striking black-and-white plumage, a brilliant red crest in males, and the heavy ivory-coloured bill that gave the species its name. The species inhabited mature bottomland hardwood swamp forests across the southeastern United States, with a separate sub-species in Cuba.

The species’ habitat — old-growth Southern bottomland forest, with the standing dead trees its foraging biology required — was systematically logged across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1930s, the population was estimated at fewer than two dozen pairs, all in remnant tracts in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. By the 1940s, the species was widely presumed lost. By the 1960s, it was being treated as extinct in most ornithological literature. By the 1990s, it was a folk-tale species for U.S. birders — the ghost bird, the Lord-God-Bird, the species you would never see.

The long history of “rediscovery”

The species has been “rediscovered” at least four times since 1944, depending on what counts as a rediscovery. Each cycle has followed a similar pattern: a credible-seeming sighting by an experienced observer, an organised search, a flurry of confirmations, then years of failure to produce definitive evidence (a clear photograph, a recording, a recovered feather), then a quiet retreat.

1944 — Mary Kuhn and others, Singer Tract, Louisiana

The last universally-accepted ivory-billed woodpecker sightings. The Singer Tract was logged in the 1940s, the species was presumed lost from that location, and from there the record becomes contested.

1971 — George Lowery’s photographs

The Louisiana State University ornithologist George Lowery presented two photographs purported to show ivory-billed woodpeckers in Louisiana. The photographs were never definitively confirmed; the species’ status remained ambiguous.

2004–2005 — Big Woods of Arkansas

The most famous of the modern rediscoveries. A team led by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy reported multiple sightings and produced a brief, contested video clip. Science published the announcement. The bird community split into believers and skeptics; subsequent intensive searches (camera arrays, acoustic monitoring, human observers) failed to produce a single unambiguous photograph or video. The Cornell team’s interpretation of the original 2004 video has been formally challenged in peer-reviewed work.

2006 onward — Florida, Louisiana, Texas, repeatedly

Multiple subsequent expeditions have produced sounds-like reports and brief sightings without producing the kind of evidence — clear, undisputed, repeatable — that would settle the matter.

The 2021 USFWS extinction proposal

In September 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally proposed delisting the ivory-billed woodpecker from the Endangered Species Act on the grounds that the species was extinct. The proposal triggered an unusual public-comment period and a small forest of submitted “we have new evidence” replies.

In July 2024, the agency formally withdrew the extinction proposal — citing newly-presented acoustic and visual evidence from southern Louisiana that, while not conclusive, was “sufficient to warrant continued investigation.” The species’ ESA listing as Endangered remains in place. The withdrawn proposal is not a finding of survival; it is a finding of insufficient certainty to declare extinction.

This is, in its way, the modern history of the species in three sentences.

What the recent evidence actually is

The strongest body of post-2020 evidence comes from a multi-year study by the National Aviary, Project Coyote, and several independent ornithologists, working in southern Louisiana. The team published a 2023 paper in Ecology and Evolution presenting:

• Multiple drone-based aerial videos showing large pied woodpeckers consistent with C. principalis
• Camera-trap photos at suspected roost cavities
• Acoustic recordings of “double knock” sounds and the distinctive nasal “kent” calls associated with the species

The paper was — depending on which ornithologist you ask — either the strongest evidence in eighty years or another iteration of the same fundamentally inconclusive pattern that has dogged this species for generations. The peer-review reception was, predictably, divided. The IUCN currently lists the species as Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct).

Why the species is so hard to confirm

The honest answer: even if the species exists, finding it definitively is genuinely difficult.

1. Habitat. The remaining bottomland hardwood forests of the southeastern U.S. are dense, swampy, hard to navigate on foot, and limited in observer access.
2. Confusion species. The pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) is a much more common species, of similar size, similar plumage, and similar voice — though to a careful observer, the differences are clear. Long-distance, brief, glimpsing observations are exactly the conditions where pileated/ivory-billed confusion is most likely.
3. Tiny population, if extant. Even if the species persists, the most generous estimates put the population at fewer than 50 individuals, scattered across an enormous geographic range. The encounter rate is necessarily very low.
4. The boy-who-cried-woodpecker problem. The repeated cycle of contested rediscoveries has set the bar for “definitive” evidence very high. Photographs that would settle most species questions are dismissed as inconclusive for this one.

What’s actually being done

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains the species on the ESA Endangered list. Habitat conservation in southern Louisiana, eastern Arkansas, and Florida continues — partly funded by the species’ ambiguous status, in the same way that some endangered-species protections function as broader habitat protections. Several research groups continue camera-array and acoustic-monitoring efforts. The National Aviary group is continuing its multi-year survey work in southern Louisiana.

If the species is genuinely down to a few dozen individuals across the U.S. range, no current conservation action is plausibly going to recover it. The genetic-bottleneck and demographic-stochasticity issues at population sizes that small are essentially intractable. The realistic best case is that a small, stable, undetected population persists for the indefinite future in remnant forest blocks, recognisable only by the occasional ambiguous trace.

What it tells us about extinction in the modern era

The ivory-billed woodpecker is the cleanest example we have of a category that the modern conservation literature has had to invent: “functionally extinct, possibly persistent.” The species cannot, by any reasonable measure, fulfil its ecological role in the bottomland forests of the southeast — the population is too small, too scattered, and too hard to confirm. But the species cannot, by any reasonable evidentiary standard, be declared extinct.

This is going to become a more common conservation status as climate-driven and habitat-driven declines push more species into the bottom-end-of-detectability range. The ivory-billed woodpecker is, in that sense, the prototype for a category that is going to grow.

The Cuban sub-species (Campephilus principalis bairdii) is a separate story with similar contours: presumed lost since the 1980s, occasional unconfirmed reports, no definitive evidence in decades. The Cuban bird’s habitat — pine forest in eastern Cuba — has been damaged but not lost. Whether the species persists there is, again, a question with no current answer.

Why we keep writing about a bird we can’t prove exists

Because the species is a useful case study for how conservation status is — and isn’t — determined. Because the bottomland-forest habitat conservation work it has motivated has measurable benefits for many other species, regardless of whether Campephilus principalis persists. And because the species is, in some sense, the perfect endpoint of the long American conservation argument: the bird that may or may not still exist, in the forest that we may or may not have logged thoroughly enough to lose forever.

Reading further

From our archive: more on the broader extinct-or-extant question in Extinct Wildlife, more on bird conservation in our Birds archive, and the legal mechanics in our cornerstone How the Endangered Species Act Actually Works. We’ve previously written specifically on this species in our older extinction-and-the-ivory-billed-woodpecker piece.

External: the IUCN Red List entry for Campephilus principalis is the canonical status reference, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s official species page is where formal listing-status updates appear when they happen.

If you live in the bottomland forest belt — Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, eastern Texas, the Florida panhandle — and have a credible sighting, recording, or photograph, please contact us. We will treat your report seriously, with the appropriate scepticism that any responsible coverage of this species requires.

— Theo Hartwell, birds & primates