The Imperial Woodpecker in Audubon's Birds of America, Vol. IV

Audubon’s octavo gives the first place among the woodpeckers to a bird it does not show. On page 212 of volume IV, under the family heading of the Picinae and the genus Picus, the entry for the Imperial Woodpecker carries a two-word line in parentheses: “(Not figured.)” There is no plate, no drawing, and no account of habits from Audubon’s own field work. The page is a relay: a note from a collector, a description from a London naturalist, and a promise that was never kept.

What the Imperial Woodpecker entry contains

The entry opens with a sentence of Audubon’s own: “The following note, which I have received from Mr. Townsend, refers to this splendid Woodpecker.” Townsend was travelling in 1834 with the botanist Thomas Nuttall, whom his note mentions. It records that on the 14th of August, 1834, he saw “several specimens of a large black Woodpecker, about the size of Picus principalis,” with a broad white band across the wings and back, living in tall pine trees and very shy. Its call, he wrote, was almost exactly that of the Red-headed Woodpecker, so much so that he and Nuttall were both deceived at first. He wounded one with slugs, lost it in a thicket after an hour of searching, and had to leave, because the party was moving fast and he wanted to stay clear of Indians following them.

(Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo, vol. IV, Philadelphia, 1842, p. 212.)

The second half of the entry is the formal description. Audubon quotes it from the 1832 proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, where John Gould presented specimens of a woodpecker “hitherto undescribed” that had been obtained from “that little explored district of California, which borders the territory of Mexico.” Gould’s Latin diagnosis calls the male black with a green gloss, a long scarlet crest on the back of the head, a white triangular patch between the shoulders, white secondary feathers and an ivory bill. The female is slightly smaller, with a crest of the same black as the body. Gould gives a length of two feet and notes that the silky pendent crest feathers measure nearly four inches. He separates the bird from the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by its size, by the lack of a white stripe on the neck, and by the bristles over the nostrils, which are black where the Ivory-bill’s are white.

Audubon ends the entry with a promise, “A figure of this species will be given at the end of the work, if a specimen can be procured,” then adds a synonymy, his own short description and a range line: “Rocky Mountains and North California.” His table lists the male at 24 inches with a 12 inch wing.

No plate: a promise the octavo did not keep

The sentence about a figure is a small piece of publishing history. The octavo ran from 1840 to 1844 and reached 500 plates, and the woodpecker is not among them. The index at the end of volume VII still lists “Woodpecker, Imperial. Picus imperialis” beside the Ivory-billed and the Pileated, so the species counts as part of the book even though the book never pictures it. The entry itself says only that no specimen had been procured. Compare the neighboring entry, which is the opposite case: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker follows on page 214 under plate CCLVI, with his famous remark about the colors of the great painter Van Dyke. The extinct birds page, Audubon’s extinct birds, gives the volume, plate and page of that species.

That makes this entry one of the rare places where Audubon prints someone else’s observation and says plainly that it is secondhand. Readers who want the species as a picture will not find one in the octavo; the entry is the whole record.

Where the bird actually lived

The description and the location do not agree, and the mismatch is the most interesting thing on the pages. Gould’s specimens came from what he called California bordering Mexico, and Audubon repeats that in his range line, adding the Rocky Mountains because of Townsend. Birds of the World describes a much narrower and more southern home: the highlands of western Mexico, from northern Sonora south to Jalisco and central Michoacan, in old-growth pine forest above 1,900 meters, mostly above 2,300 meters. The northernmost specimen was taken in July 1886 in the Rio Bavispe area of northeastern Sonora, about 70 miles south of the Arizona border, and no specimen was ever collected within the United States.

Two modest conclusions follow, and both are inferences from those sources rather than statements in them. The locality Gould’s note gave was vague, which fits the rest of the record: his specimens had reached London from a region with no firm collecting data. And a black woodpecker with a white band seen in August 1834, in country that Audubon’s range line calls the Rocky Mountains, cannot be assigned to this Mexican species on range alone. Townsend’s note remains a good field description of something large, but the modern sources do not say what.

The Imperial Woodpecker today

Birds of the World lists Campephilus imperialis as Critically Endangered and describes it as probably extinct. It gives the length as about 22 inches and calls it the largest woodpecker in the world. The last confirmed record dates from 1956, when the filmmaker William L. Rhein shot film of a lone female in Mexico, the only photographic documentation of the species. Birds of the World adds that individual birds may have lasted beyond that date, but no population or breeding record has been verified since, and it describes the loss as one of the most rapid continental bird extinctions documented.

The causes sit mostly with people. Birds of the World reports that hunting dominated over habitat loss, quoting Tanner’s conclusion that “shooting by man is the chief cause of its elimination.” The birds were shot for food, with young ones considered a delicacy, for feathers and bills believed to have medicinal value, and as large and conspicuous targets. They were also easy to stalk and stayed near the trees calling after a flock member was shot. In 1905 the collector Wilmot W. Brown took 17 specimens in two weeks in Chihuahua, and a 1922 hunting-party diary noted a specimen commanding $1,500. Logging from the 1920s onward then pushed roads and firearms up to high elevations. By the 1950s the birds were extremely rare while the forest in places still looked suitable. In 1953, according to the same source, local people near a logging operation in southern Durango said they had shot twelve within about a year. Targeted expeditions since the mid-1990s have not located an individual, and Mexican law lists the species as probably extinct in the wild.

The entry was printed ten years after Gould’s announcement, when the species was known to science only from a few skins, and the shooting that Birds of the World describes came decades later. For extinctions that Audubon did draw, with a plate behind each one, see the Great Auk and the other lost species on the extinct birds page.

Reading the page number

The 00425 in this address is the site’s own running count of text sections in volume IV, in reading order. It is not a plate number, because there is none, and it is not page 212. The count reaches the Golden-winged Woodpecker at 00445, which is plate 273 on pages 282 to 289; the Birds of America overview sets out how the volumes and plate ranges are laid out, and the Carolina Turtle-Dove page works through the same numbering for volume V.

Anyone who wants to put up cavity nesting boxes for the woodpeckers that still live in North America can start from the birdhouse guide.