Update on the Status of the Critically Endangered Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is a magnificent bird of the southeastern United States that has survived in barely detectable numbers for about 100 years. After initially being feared extinct, two of these birds were found in Florida in 1924, but they were shot the next day. In the 1930s, a small population was discovered in Louisiana, but those birds vanished as the area was being logged.

During the next several decades, there were numerous reports of sightings of what would be a good candidate for the most elusive bird in the world, but there were no published reports of sightings until 2005, when a group of ornithologists announced a series of sightings in Arkansas in an article that was featured on the cover of Science. Despite published reports of sightings in Florida and Louisiana in the years that followed, the persistence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker became controversial when nobody managed to obtain a clear photo.

In 2021, the Journal of Theoretical and Computational Sciences published an article by Dr. Michael Collins that discusses possible applications of acoustics to locating these birds and provides an overview of the strongest evidence, which appears in videos that were obtained in Louisiana and Florida during three encounters with birds that were identified in the field as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. The day before that article was published, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced a decision to declare the Ivory-billed Woodpecker extinct, which was made without addressing the strongest evidence. The Editor of JTCA then invited a follow-up article, which discusses how this issue evolved into something that should be regarded as a science scandal.

After attacking relatively weak evidence from Arkansas and becoming entrenched in the position that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is extinct, critics anonymously used specious arguments to delay the publication of the strongest evidence, which they never openly addressed after its eventual publication. Some of the leading science journals helped to enable the scandal by failing to provide diligent oversight. For example, a submission to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was rejected on the basis of an unfounded assertion that the speed of one of the videos was altered in order to increase the apparent wingbeat frequency and flight speed. It would have been easy to debunk the assertion by inspecting the raw digital video, but the editor declined to investigate.

After further developments, the Editor of JTCA invited Collins to submit another follow-up article. The decision to declare the species extinct was based on a five-year review of evidence for persistence. It came to light during an interview that the person who conducted the five-year review was unaware of basic facts about the strongest evidence. Earlier this year, additional claims of sightings and evidence from Louisiana were announced in an article by Latta et al., including a video that was promoted as being "among the strongest evidence to date" for the persistence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. In an article that just came out in JTCA, Collins argues that Latta et al. were misled by apparent white markings that are due to solar glare, and they overlooked field marks and flight characteristics that are consistent with the Pileated Woodpecker, not the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.