Call of the ivory-billed woodpecker
When Cornell Lab of Ornithology founder Arthur Allen and colleagues recorded the call of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 1935, they made history. To this day it is the only confirmed recording of the bird.
That historic recording is now part of the National Recording Registry maintained by the Library of Congress. The registry was created by Congress in 2000, “to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
In 1935 Allen launched an expedition to document vanishing North American bird species. His team, including Cornell ornithologists Peter Kellogg, George Sutton and James Tanner, found and recorded a pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers in an area of old-growth forest in Louisiana called the Singer Tract.
The Allen ivory-bill recordings are still being used by scientists conducting the first range-wide search for any remaining ivory-bills throughout the southeastern part of the United States. The recordings have been used to train searchers in what to listen for, to compare with new recordings made in the field, and to develop pattern-recognition software so that computers can scan thousands of hours of field recordings to find similar sounds.
“The superb recordings of the ivory-billed woodpecker made by Arthur Allen and co-workers in 1935 might be the most famous natural sound recordings ever made,” says Cornell Lab director Dr. John Fitzpatrick. “The haunting sounds of this majestic woodpecker have become tragic symbols of biodiversity loss.”
- Pat Leonard