The Lord God Bird Returns
The Lord God bird returns.
For you (unfortunate) non-birders, the Lord God bird is the ivory-billed woodpecker, so named because it is a huge and magnificent bird. Superficially, it resembles a pileated woodpecker, another huge and magnificent bird.
I've never seen an ivory-billed. There are very few people who have. Long thought extinct, CNN and the New York Times are reporting that ornithologists have rediscovered a male in eastern Arkansas. Evidently they have video and audio of its characteristic drumming and call.
If true - and there have been false reports and hoaxes before - this discovery would be kind of like finding Jimmy Hoffa or Amelia Earhart alive and well and working in Dinky Donuts.
Don't plan on breaking out your binoculars and field guide to go see it though. The ivory-billed lives in very remote and dense wooded areas of buggy, snaky, hot, unpleasant places like Cuba, Louisiana, and, evidently, Arkansas.
Now if we could only find a flock of Carolina Parakeets .
K-
PS. For an emminently readable book about the ivory-billed woodpecker and other extinct North American birds, check out Christopher Cokinos's book, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers.
I have several varieties of woodpecker that hang around our woods and feeders. None quite as magnificent as the one pictured but they're all fun to have around. The pileated and redheaded are the most common ones I have but I get some Downy woodpeckers, too.
Wow! That is so cool. Birders up here in Maryland would love it if pileateds and red-headed woodpeckers hung out our feeders. For us it's red-bellied, downies, flickers, and an occasional hairy at our feeders.
K-
Woodpeckers cling to the edge of the feeders and hang. They pull themselves up to grab a seed. All of the other birds just stand upright on the edges. They land on the feeders with a thud and scare off any other bird that's there. They always eat alone.