Chasing the Ghost of the Imperial Woodpecker

This chapter illustrates how the author became thoroughly obsessed with the imperial woodpecker after dreaming about it. The author spent years searching for its closest relative, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and actually had a sighting canoeing through an Arkansas bayou in 2004. A year or so later, the author was photographing woodpecker specimens at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology when an assistant curator brought out a tray containing more than a dozen imperial woodpeckers. For millennia, the imperial's pounding drumbeat echoed like the blows of a wild axman through the old-growth forests of the Sierra Madre as it bored into the massive, grub-infested pines, hammering on them powerfully for weeks at a time until they groaned, shuddered, and finally toppled with an impact that shook the ground. Victorian ornithologist John Gould dubbed it the imperial woodpecker. But it had already been named long before. To the Aztecs, it was cuauhtotomi; to the Tarahumaras, cumecocari; to the Tepehuans, uagam; and to the Mexican Mestizos, the pitoreal.