Imperial Dreams: The Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Cuba

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Cuba

Earlier this year, I headed to eastern Cuba with my colleague Martjan Lammertink to search for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the mountains above Guantanamo, the last place they were seen in the country. You can read my daily blog posts from the search on the Audubon magazine website.

Photo by Greg Kahn/Audubon

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About Me

I'm the author of six books, including my latest, Born to Fish (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; May 2018) about world-class angler Greg Myerson and his conservation efforts on behalf of the striped bass.

My other recent book is Imperial Dreams, about my search for the Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, the largest woodpecker that ever lived. Two feet in length, with the deepest black plumage and brilliant, snow-white flight feathers that showed as a white shield on its lower back, the Imperial Woodpecker lived only in the high country of northwestern Mexico. The last documented sighting of the species took place in 1956, and many scientists have already written the bird's epitaph. But stories persist of lone Imperial Woodpeckers flying yet over the most remote pine forests of the Sierra Madre.

I began searching for these birds about ten years ago and interviewing people who remembered seeing them. It was tough. The mountains have become a major center of drug growing where you often encounter AK-47-toting drug traffickers and other dangerous people.