Searching For A Ghost Bird

Searching For A Ghost Bird No one is sure whether the Imperial woodpecker is extinct—the two-foot-tall relative of the Ivory-billed woodpecker lives in a remote mountain range in Mexico, and was last credibly spotted in the 1990s. Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, describes a hair-raising expedition to try to save the woodpecker and make it home unscathed. In 2010, Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, went in search of a rare woodpecker and was lucky to make it back alive. But Tim Gallagher thought there's a chance a few still may exist, which is what drew him to the remote mountain range in Mexico where the woodpecker lives. Gallagher says logging has destroyed much of the imperial's habitat, and he heard from people who live there that 50 years ago there were extermination campaigns by loggers who thought the birds threatened the timber.