![]() ![]() The fieldwork was by funded the Neotropical Birds initiative of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The British Birdwatching Fair – Founding Global Sponsor of the BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme. The expedition turned up no evidence that Imperial Woodpeckers are still alive. In March 2010, Lammertink and Tim Gallagher of the Cornell Lab launched an expedition with members of the conservation group Pronatura Noroeste to identify and survey the film site. The film was shot by the late William Rhein with a hand-held camera from the back of a mule while camping in a remote location in the Sierra Madre Occidental in Durango state. The footage, which captures the last confirmed sighting of an Imperial Woodpecker in the wild, is available for viewing at In the color film, a female Imperial Woodpecker hitches up and forages on the trunks of large Durango pines and then launches into flight. That was until Lammertink tracked down a 16-mm film shot in 1956 by a dentist from Pennsylvania. The Imperial Woodpecker was thought to have gone extinct without anyone ever capturing photos or film of the 2-foot-tall, flamboyantly crested bird. “And it is heartbreaking to know that both the bird and the forest are gone.” “It is stunning to look back through time with this film and see the magnificent Imperial Woodpecker moving through its old-growth forest environment, said Cornell Lab of Ornithology research associate Martjan Lammertink, lead author of the paper along with four other Cornell Lab staff members and two Mexican biologists. But now, thanks to some keen detective work, the world’s largest known woodpecker can be seen once more–and this 85-second flight through time offers us a lesson about its behavior, and ours. It was once the undisputed king of its clan, but most believe the Imperial Woodpecker faded unseen into the pages of history sometime in the late 20th century in the high mountains of Mexico. The discovery of an overlooked skeleton of Imperial Woodpecker Campephilus imperialis in the bird collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring (NHMUK) is.
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