It is believed to have gone extinct around 1990,[3] but it is currently evaluated by the IUCN as critically endangered, as the survival of small populations is considered a remote possibility and due to unconfirmed reports.

As with C. p. principalis, C. p. bairdii is thought to inhabit old-growth forests with a plentiful supply of dead or dying trees; these are a source of the cerambycid and other beetle larvae that formed the bulk of its diet.

The ornithologist John Dennis located a few birds in 1948 and noted some of their feeding and other habits, commenting that "they spent so much time [preening and scratching] that I considered it unusual".

He observed that they were not especially shy or elusive once they had become used to his presence, eventually "seeming positively lethargic", although a male bird intervened quickly to drive a kestrel away from the nesting site.

[1] Although once common on the island, C. p. bairdii was already very rare by the late 1940s, when Dennis located a small population in a remnant of forest in the Cuchillas de Moa range which had already been cut-over for timber some years previously.

The last universally accepted sighting of a Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in 1987, when a single female specimen was identified in the mountains of eastern Cuba by Giraldo Alayón and Aimé Pasada, following a handful of observations of both male and female birds by a team of ornithologists, including Lester L. Short and his wife Jennifer F. M. Horne, in the area of Ojito de Agua, a hilly pine forest.