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A bird story
A bird story






Ornithologists from Auburn University repeatedly observed and heard birds they identified as ivorybills in the swamp forest in Florida in 20. Pileated woodpeckers have smaller, darker bills and a white throat. The pileated woodpecker is easily confused with the ivory-billed woodpecker. But some ornithologists now believe they were authentic. For instance, photos presented to the American Ornithological Union in 1971 were rejected as fraud, a taxidermied specimen the photographer had mounted on trees. Many of them are amateur reports easily dismissed as sightings of pileated woodpeckers, a smaller, more common relative. The last commonly accepted sighting of the ivorybill was in 1944, when the National Audubon Society president sent Don Eckelberry, a 23-year-old wildlife artist, to Louisiana’s Singer Tract to sketch a female bird, rumoured to be the last in the U.S.ĭozens of alleged sightings of the bird have been reported since then. And advocates worry that removing the bird from federal protection will open up its habitat for exploitation. The ivorybill is a symbol of the Southern wilderness, a region that some argue has not been at the forefront of U.S. 20, after decades of debate and nearly 80 years since the last undisputed sighting, the Fish and Wildlife Service declared its intention to remove the ivorybill from the Endangered Species List because it considers the bird extinct.Īs a graduate student studying the culture and politics of the ivorybill - and its conservation and extinction - I believe the announcement may be one of the most disputed extinction events in American history.








A bird story