Description and Ecology
The male had a red-sided crest, but was otherwise black, apart from the inner primaries, which were white-tipped, white secondaries, and a white scapular stripe which unlike in the Ivory-billed Woodpecker did not extend on the neck. The female was similar but the crest was all black and (unlike the Ivorybill) recurved at the top. It was once widespread and, until the early 1950s, not uncommon throughout the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico, from western Sonora and Chihuahua southwards to Jalisco and Michoacán.
It preferred open montane forests made up of Durango, Mexican White, Loblolly and Montezuma Pines and oak, usually between 2100 and 2700 meters ASL. It fed mainly by scaling bark from dead pine trees and feeding on the insect larvae found underneath. A mating pair required a very large area of untouched mature forest to survive, approximately 26 km2 (10 sq mi); outside the breeding season, the birds apparently formed small groups of a handful to a dozen individuals and moved about a wider area, apparently in response to availability of food (Lammertink et al., 1996).
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has released a film of the woodpecker, recorded in Mexico in 1956.
Read more about this topic: Imperial Woodpecker
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