Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The iconic Ivory-billed Woodpecker might be the best-known of all Lost Bird species. This giant woodpecker once occurred across parts of Cuba and the southeastern United States but its population declined dramatically in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there have recent reports of Ivory-bills in the southern United states, the last widely accepted documentation was in Cuba in 1956 (see Last Documented below).

Although there has been much more recent, contested documentation (e.g., Fitzpatrick et al. 2005, Hill et al. 2006, and Latta et al. 2023), the last widely accepted photo or video of this iconic species is from northeastern Cuba in 1956 (Gallagher 2007).

There are two recognized subspecies of Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Campephilus principalis principalis in the southeastern United States and C. p. bairdii in Cuba.