The Largest Woodpecker That Ever Lived

It’s amazing to see the difference in size between Imperial, Ivory-billed, and Pileated woodpeckers, which Bobby Harrison captured well in this photo he took of some specimens at the American Museum of Natural History. A whopping two feet in length, the Imperial easily dwarfs its closest cousin, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (center). As for the common Pileated Woodpecker (top)—well, it doesn’t even come close.

The first time I ever saw some Imperial Woodpecker specimens, during a visit to Harvard’s bird collection, I was stunned by their beauty and majesty. I knew right then that I would someday go off in search of these birds. There were so many questions to answer about them. Why had they vanished so quickly and completely? Were they already extinct? Or were they still hanging on in some of the remotest reaches of Mexico’s mighty Sierra Madre? And most important, could they be saved?

    (Photo by Bobby Harrison)

These were a few of the questions I hoped to address when I began my quest. I had planned to start searching nearly a decade ago, but my friends in Mexico kept telling me that it was too dangerous at the moment, because of all the drug-growing activity and violence in the mountains, and I should try the following year instead. But each year, the level of danger seemed to grow astronomically. I finally decided I couldn’t wait any longer—the Imperial Woodpecker couldn’t wait any longer—and one bright, sunny morning in May, I crossed the border at Columbus, New Mexico, and headed south to the Sierra Madre.

Imperial Woodpeckers of the Sierra Madre

In the high mountains of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental there once lived a woodpecker unlike any other—a giant, largest of its clan in the world, whose pounding drumbeat echoed like the blows of a wild axe man through the primeval forests as it bored into massive, grub-infested pines, hammering on them powerfully for weeks at time until they groaned, shuddered, and finally toppled with an impact that shook the ground. Victorian explorers dubbed it Campephilus imperialis—the Imperial Woodpecker. But it had already been named long before. To the Aztecs, it was cuauhtotomi; to the Tarahumaras, cumecocari; to the Tepehuanes, ua gam; and to the Spanish speakers, the pitoreal.

      (Illustration by John Schmitt)

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 was impossible to miss. Its eyes glowed golden yellow; its massive, chisel-like bill shone white as polished ivory; its feathery crest curved forward to a shaggy point. And it was noisy, blaring a loud trumpet-like toot as it hitched up a pine trunk, foraging for beetle grubs as big as a man’s thumb. But its showiness was its undoing—that and the fact that it stayed in tight family groups and often hung around, curious, when one of its group was wounded or killed.

The last documented sighting of the species was a lone female filmed by William Rhein in 1956. This was the only photographic documentation ever made of a living Imperial Woodpecker. Many biologists have already written the Imperial Woodpecker’s epitaph, and it is a sad tale of massive habitat destruction and wanton killing. But stories still persist of lone pitoreales flying yet over the most remote pine forests of the Sierra Madre.

I began searching the Sierra Madre for Imperial Woodpeckers about five years ago and interviewing people who remembered seeing them. It was a tough process. The area has become a major center of drug growing. It is remote and often dangerous as you run into AK-47-toting drug traffickers.

I’ll be posting photos I took and stories of the people I encountered in my travels through the Sierra. I have a book coming out later this year titled, Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre, which I’ll say more about as it gets closer to its release date. I invite anyone who has seen an Imperial Woodpecker (even if it was decades ago) or knows someone who’s seen one to contact me.