Run time: 01:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0OCd6b1aXU
Posted on YouTube: October 25, 2011
By YouTube Member: MacaulayLibrary
Views on YouTube: 132107
Posted on DU: November 11, 2011
By DU Member: Omaha Steve
Views on DU: 1312 |
Man poisoned them and destroyed their homes. Mexican drug lords got the last of them.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/page.aspx?pid=2314
by Tim Gallagher
I will never forget the first time I saw a specimen of the Imperial Woodpecker. I was photographing woodpecker skins at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology when an assistant curator brought me a tray containing more than a dozen specimens of Campephilus imperialis—the mightiest woodpecker that ever lived. I was absolutely stunned by the beauty and majesty of these colossal birds. As big as ravens, they easily dwarfed their closely related cousin, the American Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I knew right then that I would someday travel to the rugged high country of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental to search for these birds, which most researchers consider to be either one of the rarest species on Earth—just inches from falling over the abyss into oblivion—or already extinct.
The last documented sighting of an Imperial Woodpecker took place in 1956 in the state of Durango in the high-altitude old-growth pine forest of the Sierra Madre. It was this sighting, by Pennsylvania dentist and amateur ornithologist William Rhein, that drew the attention of woodpecker researcher Martjan Lammertink and me and eventually led us to launch an expedition in March 2010 to explore the area where Rhein had filmed a lone female Imperial Woodpecker. Amazingly, the 85 seconds of 16mm color movie footage Rhein shot in 1956 is the only photographic documentation ever captured of this species in life. Yet for decades the scientific community knew nothing about it, and that might still be the case if not for Martjan’s tireless efforts. It was he who first found a mention of the film while reading through a 1962 letter in James Tanner’s personal correspondence, archived at Cornell University.
Tanner was well known for his exhaustive studies of a small population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Louisiana in the 1930s, but he also looked for Imperial Woodpeckers in Mexico for several weeks in 1962. While planning his expedition, he wrote to William Rhein and asked about the imperials he had encountered there in the 1950s. In one of the letters Rhein wrote back to Tanner he mentioned a film he had shot, which included “some very poor footage of a female ivory-billed with several short flight shots taken hand held from the back of a mule.” (These birds were often referred to as Imperial “Ivory-billed” Woodpeckers at that time.) Martjan was shocked to read this. As far as anyone knew, no one had ever filmed or photographed a living Imperial Woodpecker, and he was determined to locate and view the film.
Martjan had been fascinated by Campephilus woodpeckers since childhood—especially the largest of them, the Ivory-billed and Imperial woodpeckers. While still in his teens, he traveled to Cuba at his own expense (using money he’d saved from working at a dairy factory in the Netherlands) and launched an expedition to search the forests of the island for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. A few years later, in the mid-1990s, he headed to the mountains of Mexico to look for the Imperial Woodpecker and completed an exhaustive months-long search through remnants of old-growth pine forest that had escaped logging. Although he didn’t find any of the birds, he did interview a number of mountain residents who told him compelling stories of lone Imperial Woodpeckers that apparently survived into the 1990s.
FULL 5 page story at link with more video.
Marta and I have a little smaller version in our back yard. A family of Pileated woodpeckers.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
