Rediscovery of the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker at Ojito de Agua (1986)

The Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis bairdii, was a bird many considered extinct. In 1948 John Dennis found a remnant population in the Cuchillas de Moa. In 1956 George Lamb photographed birds and found six territories.

August 1984. A Cuban official invited Lester L. Short, a woodpecker specialist at the American Museum of Natural History, to look into ivory-bill reports from loggers. In early 1985 he and sound recordist George Reynard searched the Guantánamo mountains for a few days. They found bark stripped from freshly dead or dying trees, but no birds. Short wrote that the local woodpeckers were "all much smaller, weaker-billed woodpeckers . . . incapable of stripping a tree in this way."

16 March 1986. Cuban biologists Giraldo Alayón and Alberto Estrada saw a female.

About two weeks later the confirming expedition set out. Nine hours of driving, the last stretch at night, brought them to a candle-lit temporary logging camp at Ojito de Agua, a hilly pine forest in the mountains of eastern Cuba. Woodsmen said they had seen an ivory-bill a day earlier in a nearby valley.

6 April 1986. Jennifer F. M. Horne, a Kenyan ornithologist and Short's wife, became the first expedition member to see one. A "big black-and-white woodpecker with an ivory bill and white wing patches." It was a male, stripping bark, and she watched for about 25 seconds. Short called it conclusive evidence that the birds had made the marks in the trees.

Short had his own sighting. The bird looked like "a giant, elongated crow." Long-necked and long-tailed, it dove from a tree, gave an "Enk!" call and vanished. Together the sightings lasted about 70 seconds. There were no photographs and no sound recordings, even with a recordist on the team.

Short recommended halting logging across an area several miles wide, open only to scientists and wildlife managers. Cuba's Ministry of Agriculture shut down logging there before he left the country. On 30 June 1986, several weeks after Short's announcement, Chet Raymo wrote in the Boston Globe: "The ivory-billed woodpecker lives!" He wondered whether a flood of birdwatchers might disturb the birds as much as the loggers had.

In 1987 Alayón reported a single female, the record usually cited as the last universally accepted sighting. The Ojito de Agua Wildlife Refuge followed in 1991. In 1996 it became part of Alejandro de Humboldt National Park.

Martjan Lammertink searched Ojito de Agua in 1991 and found no birds or signs. The best forest had been cut over in the 1950s and 1980s. In 1993 he and Estrada searched the mountains of eastern Cuba and found no large old-growth forest left around Ojito de Agua. Their 1995 conclusion was stark: "The last known population of Ivory-billed Woodpecker appears to have become extinct in 1989 or 1990." Even the bark scaling, "formerly considered a sure sign of the species' presence, may be caused by weather damage."

No hoax allegation against the 1986 team has surfaced. The record rests on the expertise of its observers. On 31 January 2016, Tim Gallagher and Lammertink returned to the spot, now called Campamento de los Rusos, and played double knocks and 1935 recordings, but nothing answered. Later local reports fell apart under scrutiny. Yet the IUCN still lists the species as Critically Endangered, and about 80% of suitable Cuban habitat has reportedly never been searched.