-- Rarer Than Ivory-bills??? --

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Recently someone sent me a photo of a partially "leucistic" Pileated Woodpecker, in this instance a specimen with a slightly enlarged white wing patch showing. Over the years from time-to-time readers have sent along such pics of Pileateds with various small white body patches present, though I've never found such examples very interesting. What does interest me though (as I've repeatedly noted before) are Pileateds with a great prevalence of white showing on their bodies. There have been several of these discovered over the years in different locales (including the Big Woods of Arkansas). A Google image search brings up some of them:

http://tinyurl.com/aul2uhv

Always worth keeping such examples in mind, not because they would likely be mistaken for Ivory-bills, but because they hint at the possibility of specimens that truly do have a large, more defined, white (symmetrical) shield-like pattern that might mimic an Ivory-bill. I'm still waiting for the day when someone gets a photo of such a bird (as Noel Snyder actually reported seeing decades ago in Florida, but didn't get a photograph). I suspect such birds truly do exist and possibly even get mistaken for IBWOs… but, I also suspect, for now, that they are rarer than Ivory-bills.
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