S2E4: Recorded Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

In this this episode we talk about ivory-billed woodpeckers and how a 1935 recording of them raises questions about whether they are extinct. This season Hannah Hunter joins Claudia as the co-host of The Animal Highlight, teaching us all about “Animals and Sound.” This season was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast. 

 Featured: 

• S4E04: Sound Archives with Cheryl Tipp on The Animal Turn.
• Recording of the Ivory Bill Woodpecker by Arthur Allen.
• Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge by Hannah Hunter.
• “The Woodpecker” by Gerard Gorman.

 Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host 
• Hannah Hunter, co-host
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer 
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Learn more about the team here. 

 Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• Thank you to the sponsors of the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast, “Animals and Sound,” where this animal highlight was originally aired 1 December 2021. 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

The Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

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Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome to Season 2 of The Animal Highlight. 
• This season is focused on “Animals and Sound” and was extracted from Season 4 of The Animal Turn Podcast (Episode with Cheryl Tipp).
• This season I am joined with a co-host, Hannah Hunter. A PhD Candidate in Geography at Queen’s University and a member of the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory.
• This episode looks at Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. 

01:20 – Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

•  Ivory-billed woodpecker and their sound is a part of Hannah Hunter’s PhD research. 
• They are (or perhaps were) striking woodpeckers that were the second largest in North America. They can be found in the south-eastern swamps of the USA as well as Cuba. 
• People call them the Lord God Bird or the Holy God Bird due to their striking size and plumage but also because of their incredible rarity. 
• They haven’t been conclusively seen since 1944 but that fact is hugely debated some people think that are still around and say that they have seen and heard them with their own eyes. 
• They are now the center of a legal debate because in the US Fish and Wildlife Service say that they are extinct and others say that they are not. 

03:11 – Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sounds

• They have two principal sound making strategies. 
•  The first are calls which are nasal sounding notes, they can be pretty otherworldly. Some people say they sound like someone blowing through a clarinet mouthpiece. They have “kent calls” because they sound like the word ‘kent’.
• Another sound making strategy is when they use their bills to hit against wood and artificial structures. Ivory-billed woodpeckers make “double knocks” which are loud rapid knocks involving two strikes of the birds bill against a wooden substrate. This is a display, an alarm, or a contact signal. These sounds of the ivory-billed woodpecker have never been conclusively recorded but we know about them from written accounts and other species. 

05:40 – Headaches? 

• “Given all the knocks and blows that are integral to a woodpeckers life you might find yourself wondering, don’t they get headaches?” 
• In the Reaktion Animal Series they have a book called “The Woodpecker” by Gerard Gorman – he talks about the anatomical adjustments that woodpeckers have which prevent them from getting headaches including how thick their skull is and a special kind of, absorbent fluid. 
• Biomimicry is trying to see how those kind of adjustments can be used to help people, like American football players, there was recently a paper by Gary Holland about just that. 

07:30 – Sound Archives and Extinction 

• There is only one sound recording that exist of the ivory-billed woodpecker and it was taken in 1935 by ornithologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  
• This recording has kent calls and it can be listened to on their website. 
• We don’t have a lot of sound recordings of presumed extinct species but this is growing because there are so many recently recorded extinct species. 
• This sound recording has radically changed the event of the ivory-billed woodpeckers extinction and one reason is because there are all of these people trying to prove the persistence of the bird. One of the ways they do this is through a process of playback. They play back this 1935 sound recording to try and get a response from ivorybills. Many of these people claim to have gotten responses to this historical recording. 
• It is amazing when you thin about this intergenerational communication. 
• There are cases in which other birds might be learning the call from the sound recording, like blue jays who mimic these calls. So the sound is almost being reintroduced back into the forest. 
• There are cultural differences across time and age. 
• Hannah Hunter - Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge

11:01 - Credits

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast.
• Thank you also to the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory who were sponsors for the fourth season of The Animal Turn podcast that was focused on “Animals and Sound” where these animal highlights were extracted from. 
• A big thank you to Hannah Hunter for co-hosting this season of The Animal Highlight
• This episode was produced and hosted by Claudia Hirtenfelder and edited by Christiaan Mentz. 
• The logo and episode artwork were created by Rebecca Shen. 
• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder