What's your take on the existence of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker aka The Lord God Bird?>2nd largest woodpecker to have existed, treasured for it's bill>named The Lord God Bird because people would exclaim "Lord God, what a bird!" when it swooped past them>the logging industry at the turn of the 20th century destroyed it's habitat of old world trees>birders would literally shoot them down to study them>It wasn't until the early 1900s that people realized they weren't being seen anymore>last ones were spotted in Louisiana in the 1930s and 40s before the land was sold for logging>not officially seen since>supposedly seen in Arkansas in 2004 and Florida in 2005 by very credible ornithologists>crappy bigfoot videos, audio recordings exist>nobody can get a good photo>complicated because Pileated Woodpeckers look almost exactly like them to the untrained eyeI believe they're real and still out there. The evidence is crap but it's worth believing in. Somewhere between Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Cuba, Mexico there's a small population in the dozens I believe.>Only verified footage from the 40'shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QueiSwwtL_g>Supposed 2021 videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaEvqw6pL88>2005 Florida sightinghttps://web2.uwindsor.ca/courses/biology/dmennill/IBWO/IBWOsearch.php>Sufjan Stevens song about themhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXh_Cj6e1oY
>>5125439as likely as tasmanian tigers still existing
Worth noting the IUCN was ready to declare them extinct a few years ago, but an emergency report put out with trailcam footage was convincing enough to delay this reclassification. It's still officially just "critically endangered" despite not being officially seen in over 80 years>Multiple lines of evidence suggest the persistence of the Ivory‐billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) in Louisianahttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10194015/
>>5125441big difference between a land mammal and a bird that only lives in swamps that are hard to reach and survey
I think it exists in extremely small numbers but that fact is kept as a secret to prevent thousands of listers from going in and doing callbacks trying to get a glimpse of one. I will freely admit that may be copium but I really hope it's the case.
>>5125614It's not an implausible theory. A small population of 50 California sea otters in Big Sur was kept secret by scientists for decades to prevent them from being poached before conservation efforts took off.
>>5125439Probably extinct with all the supposed recent sightings almost certainly being mere pileateds. As much as we'd all like otherwise, it's gone the way of the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet. I'll gladly eat my words, but as long as all the proposed evidence is 240p footage from 1000 feet away, I feel it's long since been over.
>>5125660it IS a little strange for the IUCN to keep it listed as "critically endangered" for such a long time...
>>5125834the fuck does the IUCN know? ivory-billed woodpeckers are up there with thylacines in terms of people unwilling to admit they're extinct
>>5125439based Sufjan enjoyer
>>5125834>>5126081they were ready to declare it extinct but they were flooded with last minute calls to postpone. this 2023 report has the most grainy ass bigfoot footage available but it's plausiblehttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10194015/who knows what other reports they've seen and are keeping anonymous to protect the area from being flooded by birders?
>>5125439It could still be around but if that were the case i think it would be in such small numbers that it would be impossible for it to return
>>5126159yeah, flooded with last minute calls with the aforementioned people unwilling to admit they're extinctif ivory-billeds didn't look so superficially similar to pileated and were, say, as green as a carolina parakeet, reputed sightings would no doubt shrink to nothing>>5126166if they are still around in small numbers, the california condor's at least a good (so far) success story of upping their numbers back
idea: capture all the pilleated wood peckers for a year and if anybody spots a red mohawk woodpecker during this time, it's the Ivory-Billed
>>5126166Birds can be built back up from small populations
>>5125439Not on Sonora, MX. The Cananea mine fucked the local forests where it roamed. I want to believe but is tough.
so you know how so many people say that people misreport pileated and redheaded woodpeckers as them due to their similarities?yeah, some of those could just be real instead and dismissed due to their similarities. It takes very little effort to disregard reports, and a substantial amount of effort to get viable, real footage, and especially so for anything that acts as actual proof. I don't know if they're still around but out of all the different animals that have been reported to be extinct, they've got one of the best shots at scientists suddenly saying "yep turns out they're still around."passenger pigeons are also somewhat up there due to them being able to appear like mourning doves. Less so for something like the carolina parakeet, which doesn't have anything quite like it in its historic range. Though that's the one I'd bring back if I could, personally...
>>5127053The passenger pigeon is definitely gone, unfortunately. It would gather in flocks large enough to blot out the sky, and reportedly they needed those large numbers to reproduce. That's also why efforts to breed them in captivity failed. By the time people realized they were in danger, their numbers were already too depleted.
Why not look in the greater areas around its range?Maybe what was left just moved elsewhere, adapted.
>>5127070That's fine, I won't hold fast to that part of my suggestion. I think the former half is still valid, though.
>>5125439If the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is still around then they migrated somewhere else and are enjoying a life of incognito because another bird is an almost dead ringer for their appearance, prompting everyone to think they're goneThey'd be growing their population numbers and potentially migrate back to their own habitats if they could, like a certain Big Cat that officials pretend aren't still around the area
>>5127085>If the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is still around then they migrated somewhere elseWouldn't there be sighting of them in the new location then?
>>5127229Alleged sightings of them are waved off as being confused for the Pileated Woodpecker, so the average person in those locations wouldn't even know what they saw
>>5127233is it even possible to differentiate them without comparing their sizes, which is difficult unless you see them up close or examine a dead specimen?
>>5125439would a pileated woodpecker genetically modified to be much larger be much different from an ivory-billed woodpecker in appearance or behavior?
>>5127053>>5127070Hot take: passenger pigeons are the swarming form (like locusts) of some other type of dove and the reason they're "extinct" if because the conditions aren't right for them to do it again
>>5127042i think you're referring to the imperial woodpecker
>>5127338spec evo-style kino
>>5127236I don't know, so maybe.Probably will never happen though because the alleged sightings keep getting turned away as misidentification>>5127338This is the kind of cope I like to see
>>5125439There are ornithologists who take the continued existence of the ivory billed woodpecker very seriously
>>5125439I wish the Great Auk were still around, chilling on a remote island somewhere
>>5125439https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbjBxnWAWPc
>>5127338Take was good enough several years ago for Scientists to think the same thinghttps://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-extinction-passenger-pigeon--20140617-story.html
>>5129636>killed off for basically no reasontruly pathetic>>5131324what is the mindset of people who share news articles from paid sites?
>>5126215Why not just capture all ivory billed woodpeckers and if the cages aren't empty we know they're not extinct? Would be easier since there's less of them.
>>5127307Presumably the bill wouldn't be made of ivory.
>>5131331Don't sweat over it
>>5127338DNA analysis shows that their closest relatives are the Band Tailed Pigeons which only live on the West Coast.Fossils show that Passenger Pigeons were present on the West coast during the ice age, so if they were somehow the "swarming form" of another pigeon species, that species would be the Band Tailed Pigeon.
>>5131324What's the article say? It's paywalled
