IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER (CAMPEPHILUS PRINCIPALIS): HOPE, AND THE INTERFACES OF SCIENCE, CONSERVATION, AND POLITICS

I 1986, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service appointed an Advisory Commi ee to evaluate the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a species that had been on U.S. endangered species lists since their inception. James Tanner, who was the foremost authority on the species, Lester Short, a leading authority on woodpeckers of the world, and I served on the commi ee. Other members included government biologists and long-time seekers of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. We were told that we were being called an “Advisory Commi ee” because we could not be called a “Recovery Team,” given that there were no birds to recover and, as such, there could be no Recovery Plan. At our fi rst meeting, held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we learned that our intended function was to serve as a sanctioning body to “offi cially” declare the Ivory-billed Woodpecker extinct. We reviewed published and unpublished reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers that had accumulated since the 1940s and agreed that the evidence for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s continued existence was slim, though there had been a continuing stream of anecdotal reports of the species from across the Southeast. Both Tanner and Short were prepared to declare the species extinct, given that more than 50 years had passed without confi rmation of its existence. But there had not been a range-wide systematic survey of potential Ivory-billed Woodpecker habitats since Tanner’s eff orts in the 1930s. Thus, it was unreasonable, I argued, to declare the species extinct without making a serious eff ort to fi nd it. In part as a response to the Advisory Commi ee meeting, Michael Harwood (1986) wrote an article in Audubon, bemoaning the lack of a ention given to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and lambasting the “ornithological establishment” for doing nothing in response to the fl ow of anecdotal reports. In the article, titled “You Can’t Protect What Isn’t There,” Harwood (1986:118) noted that “the ghostly Ivory-bill, lacking offi cial sanction, might just as well have been extinct all these years...listing has led to virtually nothing in the way of federal rescue activity.” The Ivory-billed Woodpecker Advisory Commi ee concurred that we owed it to the species to make one last search. As the dissenter, and as one doing research on woodpeckers in the Southeast, the searching fell to me. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided a grant of $60,000, and I used a sabbatical to conduct the search. Because of limited funding, I focused Whitaker Center, Florida Gulf Coast University, 10501 FGCU Boulevard South, Fort Myers, Florida 33965, USA JEROME A. JACKSON1 IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER (CAMPEPHILUS PRINCIPALIS): HOPE, AND THE INTERFACES OF SCIENCE, CONSERVATION, AND POLITICS The Auk 123(1):1–15, 2006 © The American Ornithologists’ Union, 2006. Printed in USA.