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Imperial woodpecker1/14/2024 ![]() Although individual birds may have persisted after that date, no populations or breeding records have been verified since that time. With only 124 years from the time of the Imperial Woodpecker’s scientific description to the lone female photographed by Rhein, the loss of this species represents one of the most rapid continental bird extinctions yet documented. Early naturalists noted intensive hunting pressure reduced populations, and from 1930 onward its habitat was subjected to widespread logging that not only took out large pines for timber and pulp, on which the species depended for insect food and nest cavities, but resulted in access roads for people who shot Imperial Woodpeckers for food, folk remedies, and out of curiosity. , which included footage of a lone female. Unverified reports indicated a few Imperial Woodpeckers may have survived somewhat later, but the last confirmed record (and only photographic documentation) was in 1956 when William L. ) in the same year that Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle, the last museum specimen of this Mexican endemic was collected in the northern Sierra Madre Occidental in 1947. Proceedings of the Committee of Science and Correspondence of the Zoological Society of London 2: 139-140. ![]() ![]() (1832) Specimens were exhibited of a species of woodpecker, hitherto undescribed. Reported to occur in pairs or in small groups, highly vocal, and habitually returning to the same dead trees and logs to forage for large beetle grubs in the wood, this species proved an easy target once firearms became widely available to residents within its range and is now considered extinct. The largest woodpecker in the world, the Imperial Woodpecker inhabited old-growth pine forests in central and northwestern Mexico above 1,900 m elevation (mostly 2,300 m and up), in flat or lightly undulating table lands prone to settlement. ![]()
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