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Behind the big themes, celebrated figures, and dry dates of history are the interesting stories of life in the past and ordinary people. Southeast Missouri has a varied and rich history that you often don’t hear about in history classes. Join Bill Eddleman of the State Historical Society of Missouri to hear about these stories with “Tales from Days Gone By.” Listen in on the second and fourth Thursday of the month during Morning Edition (7:45 a.m.) and All Things Considered (4:44 p.m.)

The "Lord God Bird" - A Vanished Part of Missouri

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Painting by John James Audubon
Public domain.
Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Painting by John James Audubon

European settlers in southern Missouri sometimes encountered a large woodpecker in bottomland forests. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was larger than any other woodpecker, including the Pileated Woodpecker which is still common today. Males had a red crest, females had a black crest, most of the flight feathers were white, and the species had a stout, ivory-colored bill that gave it its name. Its striking appearance, loud calls sounding much like a toy trumpet, and active behavior was startling, and many of those seeing one for the first time remarked, “Good Lord, what was that bird?” Thus, the popular name of Lord God Bird.

Indigenous peoples revered the woodpecker, and the heads and bills adorned stems of calumet pipes. Remains of the bird unearthed in habitation sites occur up the Missouri River into Nebraska. The species likely inhabited river bottoms and swamps in Missouri as far as the Kansas City area, St. Louis, and rivers of the Ozarks. Their main foods were the larvae of large beetles found in larger dead trees, and seasonally berries. It thus required ancient forests with very large dead trees—most often found in bottomlands and swamps.

Unfortunately few of the early settlers recorded much about the animals they encountered, and trained observers rarely visited Missouri before territorial days. The Stephen Long expedition found Ivory-bills in Arkansas in 1820, but spent less time in Missouri and mentioned no woodpeckers. The first written recording of Ivory-bills in Missouri was in the 1825 journal of John James Audubon, when he found them near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. He regularly saw them along the Mississippi downstream. Curiously, Audubon failed to mention the woodpecker when he spent part of winter 1810-11 in the area around present-day Commerce, Missouri.

U. S. Geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh traveled the Natchitoches Tract, present-day Highway 67, into Arkansas in November 1834, and found Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers along the Little Black River in Ripley County. He stated, “…it was a fine open country, and very extensive; and the trees were so far asunder from each other that we could have imagined ourselves travelling through some park. Here we saw the first Ivory-billed Woodpeckers…a beautiful bird, not found farther north than this part of the country.” That evening his party stayed at the Widow Harris Cabin, at the Arkansas state line. Twentieth-century excavations by James and Cindy Price found Ivory-bill bones among the animal remains at this site. The botanist Dr. George Engelmann saw the woodpecker in the same area in March, 1837.

According to a number of second-hand reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, the bird persisted in at least part of Missouri through the 19th Century. A female in a museum collection came from near Forest Park, St. Louis, on May 8, 1886. The woodpecker’s last stronghold was Southeast Missouri, until logging and then draining progressed across the region after the Civil War. The pioneer ornithologist in Missouri, the German immigrant Otto Widmann, reported the last sighting for Missouri was in 1895, when Captain Gillespie of the St. Louis police force brought one home from Stoddard County and had it mounted. It was a male killed near the Little River on November 8 by a local hunter named Spradlin eight miles southwest of Morley. The woodpecker held on until the 1930s in Florida and Louisiana swamps, until logging of the last known site in Louisiana in 1944.

Corrected: February 25, 2022 at 8:03 AM CST
This story has been updated. The article originally reported that the woodpecker had been declared extinct. The ivory-bill woodpecker has been proposed to be declared extinct.
Bill Eddleman was born in Cape Girardeau, and is an 8th-generation Cape Countian. His first Missouri ancestor came to the state in 1802. He attended SEMO for two years before transferring to the University of Missouri to study Fisheries and Wildlife Biology. He stayed at Mizzou to earn a master of science in Fisheries and Wildlife, and continued studies in Wildlife Ecology at Oklahoma State University.
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