American Grail

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker – sometimes called the Grail or Lord God Bird – is the rarest bird in the United States; it is also arguably, the most iconic one, surpassing the Bald Eagle in some respects. It is sacred in many Native American traditions, and early colonizers recognized its unique beauty and quickly equated it with indigenous people, doomed to vanish behind the axe and the plow. Audubon described it poetically as a creature of Spanish Moss-draped southern swamps, deepening its mythic resonances. By the late 19th-century it had become a valued item among collectors, and specimens were shot in large numbers. By the 1920s, it was believed to be extinct, and searching for it had become an obsessive quest for some ornithologists. It was rediscovered in Louisiana’s Singer Tract in 1932, filmed and recorded there in 1935, and formally studied from 1937-1939.

In 1936, Aldo Leopold described it as “a bird inextricably interwoven with our pioneer tradition—the very spirit of that ‘dark and bloody’ ground which has become the locus of our national culture.”

The Singer Tract was logged in the 1940s, and the last generally accepted sighting was in 1944. The effort to save the Singer Tract was one of the first major battles of the modern environmental movement, inspiring Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.” By the 1960s, the ivorybill's place as symbol of that movement was cemented, and though believed extinct, it was among the species protected by the predecessor to the Endangered Species Act in 1966.

There were multiple “rediscoveries” between the early 1950s and the mid-2000s, all of them controversial and none resulting in a consensus that the species persisted. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed declaring the ivorybill extinct, insisting on a very high evidentiary standard, a move that would weaken the already anemic Act. The proposal, which is still pending, was hotly contested, and a final decision has been delayed indefinitely. Evidence has been presented, and a peer reviewed paper supporting persistence and presenting evidence of multiple birds at a site in Louisiana was published in 2023.

Even the reasons for the ivorybill’s decline are contested; habitat destruction is widely believed to be the cause, but some claim it was almost entirely due to hunting, first for food and then for specimens. Almost everything about the bird is a mystery; it is an avian Rohrschach for the 21st-century, a screen onto which those who are convinced it survives and those who insist on extinction project their beliefs and biases. Staving off a definitive federal decision on extinction could be crucial for the bird’s survival. Ecologist and conservation biologist Reşit Akçakaya told The Scientist, “the main fear that we have is that because we think [a species is] extinct, we no longer have to protect it.”

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker's story is one of death and resurrection, hope and despair, human folly and cognition, of scientists and amateurs, of the obsessed and the dismissive, of politics and unlikely alliances, of certainty and doubt, of fraud and suspicion, of resilience and persistence.