Field research by Tim Gallagher and Martjan Lammertink, reported in Gallagher's 2013 book, found evidence — in the form of accounts by elderly residents in the bird's range, who saw imperial woodpeckers decades earlier, and who discussed their recollections with the researchers — that foresters working with Mexican logging companies in the 1950s told the local people that the woodpeckers were destroying valuable timber, and encouraged the people to kill the birds.