Back in the '50s, he made several self-funded trips to the mountains of Mexico to look for this bird, and he's the only one known to have captured the bird on film. LICHTMAN: Rhein must have felt similarly. I just get real pleasure from seeing them. GALLAGHER: They're just so huge and powerful, swift-flying, and their crests. LICHTMAN: Tim Gallagher, by the way, is also really obsessed with the imperial woodpecker. And he was really obsessed with the imperial woodpecker. GALLAGHER: William Rhein was a dentist who lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and he was also an amateur ornithologist. LICHTMAN: That's basically how the story ends, but it really begins 50 years ago with the late William Rhein. The guy was trembling and all white as a sheet. GALLAGHER: It's heavy drug-growing country, holding AK-47s. LICHTMAN: An ordinary birding expedition this was not. LICHTMAN: And that's where the story turns. GALLAGHER: The Sierra Madre's always been a rugged, ungovernable place. But Tim Gallagher thought there's a chance a few still may exist, which is what drew him to the remote mountain range in Mexico where the woodpecker lives. The last credible sightings were in the '90s. LICHTMAN: Its closet relation is the ivory-billed woodpecker, and like its cousin, the imperial is critically endangered if not extinct. TIM GALLAGHER: As far as we've been able to determine from the fossil record, there's never been a bigger woodpecker. Our multimedia editor Flora Lichtman talked to Gallagher about it and has this story.įLORA LICHTMAN, BYLINE: The imperial woodpecker is two feet tall. In 2010, Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, went in search of a rare woodpecker and was lucky to make it back alive. Birding doesn't seem like a risky pastime, does it? What's the worst that could happen? Sunburn, a little rain, a little cold, lost binoculars.
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