The ongoing narrative of Ivory‐billed Woodpecker rediscovery and support for declaring the species extinct

Abstract

The Ivory‐billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis was considered extinct by many until, in 2005, researchers announced its rediscovery in continental North America and released video evidence obtained from the state of Arkansas. This claim garnered worldwide media attention and sparked renewed interest in searching for and conserving the bird. Audio recordings from the same region, including sounds closely resembling the territorial double raps of Campephilus woodpeckers, were also released. Both the video and audio evidence, however, were challenged in several journal articles, though these critiques did not receive as much attention. We estimated that over 578 000 h were collectively spent searching for the species across the southeastern USA from 2004 to 2021, but these efforts failed to yield indisputable proof of the species' persistence. More than US$ 20.3 million in federal and state government funding was spent on the bird from 2005 to 2013, a sharp increase in expenditures from the years before the rediscovery announcement. Regardless of whether or not it was a reallocation of funds from other taxa, this money, along with other associated resources (e.g. time and human effort), would have undoubtedly benefited other underfunded threatened and endangered taxa had it not been spent on the woodpecker. Given the published criticisms and counterevidence, as well as the lack of definitive proof that the species still exists, it appears that this endeavour was driven largely by the narrative of rediscovery advanced by prominent researchers in ornithology, rather than the actual evidence, and that this probably helped to perpetuate the use of poor‐quality evidence in subsequent claims of the species' persistence. In 2021, the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed an extinction declaration for the Ivory‐billed Woodpecker. Based on available information, this decision seems logical, and would close this chapter on one of the biggest losses to North American avifauna in modern history.