Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge

Abstract

If an apparently extinct bird calls in a forest, and there are people there to hear it—to record it, even—is it still extinct? The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was last ‘officially’ seen in the United States in 1944, but its extinction continues to be a subject of intense debate between conservation authorities, scientists, and grassroots activists. Tensions peaked around 2005, when scientists from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology announced their rediscovery of the species. However, their evidence received significant challenge from other ornithologists, and this apparent rediscovery has since been generally dismissed. In 2021, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service recommended the ivorybill be declared officially extinct. Still, many people continue to trawl the Southeastern forests in search of ivorybills. In this article, I investigate the methods, debates, and results of efforts to locate this species, with a focus on sound. In doing so, I explore the interconnected roles of sound and space in the making of extinction knowledge. Sonic search methods of listening, sounding, and translating are core ways that searchers attempt to attune to, communicate with, and establish evidence of ivorybills. Additionally, sonic search practices are critical spaces of negotiation and contestation between different searchers, between searchers and ivorybills, and between searchers and skeptics. Ultimately, this article argues that sonic geographies affect the production of extinction knowledge, and vice versa—extinction knowledge making practices produce distinct sonic geographies.

Postextinction Geographies: Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

“…The ecological and ethical merits of a revisited bucardo cloning program are disputed given that the biological material of a single individual remains cryopreserved, thus rendering repopulation efforts impossible without hybridization with extant species (García-González and Margalida 2014 ; Searle 2022 ). Such questions resemble similar debates concerning the authenticity of ivorybill sound recordings to represent accurately and authentically the extinct (Hunter 2023a ), and exemplify the affective, situated, and intersubjective nature of this existential question. Towns and Mayer both prompt considerations of how more-than-human relations are altered and reimagined—across affective and epistemological registers—as they transcend spatial and temporal scales.…”

“… 2023 ). The same fractured assemblage of ivorybill traces informs search methods on the ground: instructing searchers, often in conflicting and ambiguous ways, where and how ivorybills might be found (Hunter 2023a ).…”

“… 2023 ). Some claim to have encountered extant ivorybills by carefully using historical traces of presence through methods like these (Hunter 2023a ). Searchers hope these efforts could lead to conclusive evidence of the birds’ presence that, in turn, could ultimately save ivorybills from extinction.…”