Imperial Woodpecker talk in Kentucky

I'll be giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Ornithological Society on Saturday, September 20, 2014, at 7:00 p.m. at Lake Barkley State Resort Park in Cadiz, Kentucky.  The meeting is open to everyone. I'll be talking about my search for the Imperial Woodpecker in the mountains of northwestern Mexico. I hope my friends from Kentucky and nearby states will join me. My old Ivory-billed Woodpecker searching friend Bobby Harrison—who joined me on one of the expeditions to Mexico and on many trips through the southern swamps—has promised to be there, so it should be an interesting evening. For more information, send an email to kistlers@scrtc.com or visit the KOS website.

The Empire of the Imperial Woodpecker

The empire of the Imperial Woodpecker is a remote landscape, high in the mountains of northwestern Mexico—a place of lofty, old-growth pines and rugged oaks swept by powerful winds, rains, and snowstorms. Here these giant woodpeckers lived and evolved across the millennia, subsisting on grubs as big as your thumb that they reached by prying off slabs of thick pine bark with their chisel-like white bills.

                      (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

These mighty birds thrived well into the mid-20th century, but then they ran into trouble. Although the plateau pine-oak forests were remote, labor was cheap. Logging companies moved into the Imperial Woodpeckers vast domain, and the mighty pines came tumbling down. 

   (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

Not only that, but the dirt roads the logging crews cut through the forests opened up these pristine areas to subsistence hunters, some of whom killed Imperial Woodpeckers for food, for the rumored medicinal values of the birds' feathers, or just out of curiosity. 

By the mid-1950s, the Imperial Woodpecker had vanished across most of its range. Today it's hard to find anyone below the age of 70 who even remember the birds, even those living in isolated villages, where people still live in the old ways, in adobe huts or log cabins, without any modern conveniences. But I did find a number of people who had more recent credible sightings, and their stories are what kept me going as I traveled through the high country of the vast Sierra Madre. 

How Do You Find a Needle in a Haystack?

    (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

People often ask how I could possible hope to locate a bird as rare as an Imperial Woodpecker in an area as vast as Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental—that is, if there are any of them left at all. It's a fair question. Unless you're lucky enough to see one fly past close enough to make a positive identification or hear one calling or drumming, you could walk right past an Imperial Woodpecker as it clung to the other side of a tree trunk and never know it was there. 

To help increase our odds, we used a custom-made device to mimic the unique double-knock drumming done by most Campephilus woodpeckers—which sounds like BAM-bam, with the second impact hitting only a fraction of a second after the first, sounding almost like an echo. Martjan Lammertink designed the device, which consists of a birdhouse-like wooden box lashed to a tree trunk to act as a resonator, and a striker, which resembles two lengths of broomstick, each about a yard long, with a pivot bolt in the center. To make the sound, you swing the striker in an arc, hitting the box hard with the first stick while the other one swings over the pivot bolt, hitting the box less than a second later, producing a near-perfect rendition of a Campephilus woodpecker double-knock.

Martjan tried out the double-knock box in Latin America and was able to draw responses from two species of Campephilus woodpeckers, the Pale-billed and Magellanic (which are relatives of the Ivory-billed and Imperial woodpeckers). To see this device in action, watch "Talking with a Pale-billed Woodpecker."

    (Photo by Tim Gallagher)

Above, Martjan Lammertink uses a GPS unit to record the precise location of each double-knock session during our expedition in the Sierra Madre.