Don Eckelberry's Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Singer Tract, Louisiana (1944)

The ivory-billed woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, has another name. The Lord God Bird. It comes from what people exclaimed when they saw one. By the 1940s one of its last strongholds was the Singer Tract, old forest in the Tensas River bottomland of Madison Parish, Louisiana.

Then the forest was sold. Singer sold 13,491 acres to Chicago Mill and Lumber in 1942 and the rest in January 1944. About 505 German prisoners of war were held in Tallulah. With their labour, the mill ran 24 hours a day. In the winter of 1943 and 1944, Richard Pough of Audubon searched for six weeks. He found a single bird. A female.

Don Richard Eckelberry was a wildlife artist for the National Audubon Society. He was 23. "I convinced John Baker, the president, to let me go down and see it." It was April 1944. He travelled by boat upriver past Alligator Bayou, then by car to John's Bayou, and waited near the roost tree.

"She came trumpeting in to the roost, her big wings cleaving the air in strong, direct flight, and she alighted with one magnificent upward swoop." Then she climbed, "her black crest erect to the point of leaning forward," and "hitched up the tree at a gallop, trumpeting all the way." Near the top she went quiet and preened. Then she sidled around to the roost hole, double-rapped and went in. At 7:20, as they were about to leave, she popped out and raced up to the broken top, "bathed in rich orange light of the setting sun."

He stayed about two weeks and followed her whenever he heard the double rap, "an astonishingly loud, hollow, drumlike Bam-am!" One day he traced some hammering, expecting a pileated woodpecker. It was the ivorybill, on a broken stub "not 15 feet above the ground." He watched her for a good ten minutes. "It isn't really a woodpecker; it's a bark peeler."

No photograph, film or recording from 1944 has been found. What remains is his hand. His pencil and coloured pencil sketches are held at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin. Author B.J. Hollars found them in a manila folder about 70 years later. In half of them the female's black crest is drawn red. That is the male's marking. Hollars floats the idea of a pair. Most commentators see artistic licence.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service calls April 1944 on the Singer Tract the last commonly agreed sighting. In 2021 it proposed declaring the species extinct. In October 2023 it held the decision back as "an ongoing effort." Secondary sources report the proposal was withdrawn in July 2024. The bird remains listed as Endangered.

Nobody has accused Eckelberry of a hoax. The argument is over the word last. Mark Michaels of Project Principalis has "no doubt" the encounter happened, but calls the date "fundamentally flawed and arbitrary." He cites game warden Gus Willett, who reportedly saw a pair in November 1948. Claims kept coming, from the Fielding Lewis photographs of 1971 to the Pearl River in 1999 and Bayou DeView in Arkansas.

Eckelberry told the story in 1961 in "Search for the Rare Ivorybill." He summed her up in one line. "I was tremendously impressed by the majestic and wild personality of this bird, its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness." Every later claim is still measured against his two weeks with her.