Guatemala: Pale-billed Woodpecker

We got to see Pale-billed Woodpeckers at a couple of sites in February; this fine individual was dismantling a tree right behind the Jungle Lodge at Tikal, where it drew, deservedly so, the attention of birders and non-birders alike.

For birders from the north, seeing this species or its congeners in the tropics is always bittersweet. For the Pale-billed Woodpecker, which ranges north to southernmost Sonora, is a member of the genus Campephilus, like the two great extinct woodpeckers of North America: the Ivory-billed and the Imperial. Inconceivably, we gave those two up in return for furniture veneers and ammunition chests, and they aren’t coming back.

Unlike Americans three generations ago, Guatemala seems to be taking advantage of its chance to do it right. Inevitably, there are pressures for ‘development’, but admirably, enviably, there are also careful and concerted efforts for conservation, so that the resources the country is so richly blessed with are preserved for the enjoyment, the nourishment even, of residents and visitors both.

How do I know that? There was ample opportunity between the exciting birding and the excellent presentations to simply watch and listen to the ways people reacted to landscape. And I took it as the best possible sign that among the generous gifts given me by my new Guatemalan friends was a wood product. Not a sewing machine case, not an ammunition chest, but this, made and given not in commemoration of a bird that is gone but in celebration of the birding that is to be.