Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Articles and Comments by various

Draft 2020; 2025

The Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker attracted attention from "northern" conservation groups, researchers, birders and photographers. During the last century both the American and Cuban taxa were considered one species so there was some overlap in the people involved in trying to learn more about the "species". 

Here, first are the two short articles soon after the '86 to '87 rediscovery in Cuba of the Cuban Ivory-billed.  Then there is a prior, hard to find, Lamb Research Report:


An abridged 20th century chronological history of the efforts include John Dennis and Davis Crompton (1948), George and Nancy Lamb (1956), Orlando Garrido (1968, details to be researched, no pictures) and Cuban biologists Giraldo Alayón and Alberto Estrada (1986), Short (1985 and '86).   

Copyright Estrada and Alayon

 1986 

Here is the New York Times article that details the above events in Cuba.

Noteworthy, is Short's mistaken thought the Cuban Ivory-billed was essentially the same as the mainland species even though they diverged, unbeknownst to him, approximately a million years ago. His more than optimistic outlook that someday excess Cuban IBs could be used to reestablish the species in the USA is rather bizarre. J. Jackson wandered deeper into fiction by stating that the IB could have been brought by humans to the mainland from Cuba.  

 

Related to the land preservation the Ivory-billed has always and still needs (2016) assistance.

Mac McClelland (2016) wrote:  

The Cuban sightings in the ’80s got the forest they’ve just exited protected, and perhaps not a moment too soon—three of the areas where George Lamb photographed the Ivory-bills in the ’50s are completely logged and mined out, in a country that is really just now opening up and increasing infrastructure and investment.

• May 23, 2006

• #9

The species is considered likely to be extinct in Cuba, as intensive searches have not found any new records subsequent to those of the late 1980s. Calls heard in 1998 suggested that it might survive in the highest reaches of the Sierra Maestra in south-east Cuba, an area from which there had been no historical records and at an elevation higher than the known altitudinal range of the species. Follow-up searches in the area found poor habitat and no indications of presence of the species. Any remnant population in either the USA or Cuba is likely to be tiny.

references can be found here:

http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/species/index.html?action=SpcHTMDetails.asp&sid=719&m=0

• Mar 11, 2016

• #18

Melanie said:

Is there any photograph of Orlando Garrido's Cuban Ivory-billed woodpecker sighting in 1968?

No. Nor of any of the sightings that came after.

Interesting comment by an earlier poster about political events. The Cuban revolution and the US administration’s reaction to it almost certainly came at precisely the wrong time for Ivorybills in Cuba. In the late 1940s and mid 1950s, Dennis Lamb had found a reasonably healthy population of the species in the Cuban Oriente, and the US chapter of ICBP were very interested in actively conserving it as a result. All of that went of the window with the ascent of Castro.

I’d personally say that people have been looking in the wrong places for Ivorybills in Cuba. The Sierra Maestra is well known (among many Cubans) to be what we’d call in Brazil detonada (think detonated), while it was plain the Cuchillas was running out of habitat fast in the early to mid 1980s. That doesn’t mean that Cuban Ivorybills are still around, but there are a lot of remote areas in eastern Cuba, with no roads nearby. Cuban Kites and Cuban Solenodons persist in such areas and have only been found recently, despite all the field work by Lammertink and others, so we should keep hope, but probably not expectation.

Prior to the 1956 George and Nancy Lamb, recent college graduates at the time, came to study Cuban vory-bills on a grant from the Pan-American Section of the International Committee for Bird Preservation.

The Lambs communicated with a rather brief 2 man effort sponsored by National Audubon Cuban in 2016 that mainly went to the 1986 sightings location. The production of double knocks, the main survey method may have only covered 12 square miles; the visit seemed a bit dis-organized other than  for media attention.

Comment by  (A few minutes ago I actually received an email from the Lambs, now in their 80s, saying: “That should be a great adventure! Good luck and please let us know what you find. Thanks for keeping us in the loop, George & Nancy.”) The two spent several months in eastern Cuba, in the same area we will be traveling, and located six pairs. In the paper George Lamb published the following year, he suggested conservation measures to the major landowners in the area (Bethlehem Cuba Iron Mines Company and Freeport Sulphur) that should be taken to preserve the birds’ habitat. And the companies seemed to be amenable to the measures.

But in January 1959, the Cuban revolutionaries, who had been fighting government forces for several years, finally overthrew the Batista Regime and took over Cuba, and very little news of the birds came out of the country—that is, until 1986, when Lester Short of the American Museum of Natural History and his colleagues announced seeing Ivory-bills in the mountains of eastern Cuba. It was a huge story, and so hopeful. Perhaps the birds could be saved. But then the trail went cold. The last sighting in Cuba was in 1987.

Comments by others: DN 

Although once common on the island, C. p. bairdii was already very rare by the late 1940s, when Dennis located a small population in a remnant of forest in the Cuchillas de Moa range which had already been cut-over for timber some years previously. George Lamb found six territories still there in 1956, and recommended that a conservation plan be implemented, but the 1959 Cuban Revolution was to intervene.

The last universally accepted sighting of a Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in 1987, when a single female specimen was identified in the mountains of eastern Cuba by Giraldo Alayón and Aimé Pasada, following a handful of observations of both male and female birds by a team of ornithologists, including Lester L. Short and his wife Jennifer F. M. Horne, in the area of Ojito de Agua, a hilly pine forest. Although the area was immediately designated as protected by the Cuban government, searches in 1991 and 1993 failed to find any further traces of the bird, and it became clear that the birds seen in 1986–87 had already been in "dire" circumstances. Thus the Cuban ivory-bill was inferred to have gone extinct around 1990. The area given protection in the 1980s is now part of Alejandro de Humboldt National Park.

The IUCN Red List notes that calls were reportedly heard in 1998 in the highest reaches of the Sierra Maestra, but that a subsequent search failed to find any trace of the species or of good potential habitat: it is considered a (remote) possibility that some individuals may survive, as around 80% of suitable habitat in Cuba has yet to be searched.

As with C. p. principalis, C. p. bairdii was thought to inhabit old-growth forests with a plentiful supply of dead or dying trees; these were a source of the cerambycid and other beetle larvae that formed the bulk of its diet. Most of Cuba's lowland deciduous forests had been cleared by the early 20th century, and the species became restricted to the montane pine forests in the northeastern part of the island. Its original range was given as through the Organ Mountains, in the lowland forests of the Ensenada de Cochinos and along the Hanabana River.

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#nature #naturephotography #wildlife #naturelovers #wildlifephotography #IvoryBilledWoodpecker, #LordGodBird, #ExtinctSpecies #BirdConservation  #Ornithology #EndangeredSpecies #IvoryBilledWoodpeckerSighting #IvoryBilledWoodpeckerClaims #Woodpeckers #Birds #Wildlife #biodiversity