The Ivory-billed Woodpecker - Dead or Alive?

A video has surfaced of at least one ivory-billed woodpecker in the bottomland forest of eastern Arkansas, a bird that is eighteen to twenty inches tall with a thirty inch wingspan and was last seen in the United States in 1944. It took quite an adventure to find the bird: a year of searching the Big Woods and several calls that may or may not have been the ivory-bill, seven sightings and finally the video footage. All of which led to scientists removing the bird from the extinct list in April.

Assuming this footage is verified and the bird remains off the extinct list, it will be one of at least twenty-four species pd extinct to be removed from the list. As more and more creatures return from the dead, so to speak, there is a question as to the value of the word "extinct". Ross MacPhee, the curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, has been pushing for the extinction, or at least limitations, of the word extinct. He is concerned that people are using the word without careful consideration to the facts about whether a species is actually alive or dead.

In the Nineties, the Committee on Recently Extinct Organisms was formed by MacPhee and his colleagues. Their plan was to devise criteria for determining extinction. Ideas included taxonomic identification and waiting period of fifty years before a species could be declared extinct. The lead scientists, from Cornell University, of the ivory-billed report also agree that "extinction" should be used much more conscientiously. In some cases, such as that of the passenger pigeon, the species has not been seen in nearly one hundred years and therefore it can be treated as formally extinct. But there are other cases of small plants and vertebrates in which extinction can only be suspected, but they still may alive be in remote areas. A lettering system has been devised for describing the extinction level of species, such as GX (pd extinct) or GH (possibly extinct) and within those contexts there are further breakdowns to determine the severity of extinction pd by scientists.

As of now, the ivory-billed woodpecker has been removed from the extinction list, but it seems unlikely that the bird will, in fact, survive much longer unless its natural habitat is able to grow back successfully. Even if it does, this bird may fail to survive, but it will help other creatures indigenous to the area avoid the extinction list.