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godzilla 12 September 2006 Endangered & Extinction 569 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

www.birds.cornell.edu

Long believed to be extinct, a magnificent bird–the Ivory-billed Woodpecker–has been rediscovered in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting of the species in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-bill still survives in vast areas of bottomland swamp forest.

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The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is a very large and extremely rare or extinct member of the woodpecker family, Picidae. It is officially listed as an endangered species, and until recently had widely been considered extinct. However, acclaimed sightings of at least one male bird in Arkansas in 2004 and 2005 were reported in April 2005 and audio evidence suggesting the presence of the bird has also been collected. If its rediscovery is confirmed, this would make the Ivory-billed Woodpecker a lazarus species. Skepticism of the reported sightings appeared to be growing as of early 2006, however, with a number of experts questioning the evidence.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is the second-largest woodpecker in the world, slightly smaller than the closely related Imperial Woodpecker (C. imperialis) of western Mexico, another rare species which is very likely to be extinct. It measures from 48 to 53 cm (19 to 21 in) in length and 450 to 570 g (1.0 to 1.25 lb) in weight, with short legs and feet ending in large, curved claws.

The bird is shiny blue-black with extensive white markings on its neck and on both the upper and lower trailing edges of its wings. It has a pure white bill and displays a prominent top crest, red in the male and black in the female. These characteristics distinguish it from the darker-billed Pileated Woodpecker. Like all woodpeckers, it has a strong and straight chisel-like bill and a long, mobile, hard-tipped, barbed tongue. Its drum is a single or double rap, and its alarm call, a kent or hant, sounds like a toy trumpet repeated in a series or as a double note.

The reason for the species’ decline was primarily due to loss of habitat and also hunting by collectors. Even if the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is not extinct, most believe that only a handful could still be living.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia