The large and conspicuous bird has long been known to the native inhabitants of Mexico and was called cuauhtotomomi in Nahuatl, uagam by the Tepehuán and cumecócari by the Tarahumara.

The bird 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 is likely that, in the past, the woodpecker's range followed the Sierra Madre north into Arizona, but by the time it was scientifically described in the 19th century, it was already confined to Mexico.

[7] It feeds mainly on the insect larvae found underneath bark scaled from dead pine trees.

[8] The main food source, beetle larvae in snags, is probably distributed in patches and peaks within a short period of time.

[9] The imperial woodpecker is officially listed as "critically endangered (possibly extinct)" by the IUCN and BirdLife International.

Researchers believe that their decline was also accelerated by active eradication campaigns conducted by logging interests and by over-hunting — for use in folk medicine and because nestlings were considered a delicacy by the Tarahumara.

It has been hunted for sport, food and for medicinal purposes over a long period of time and feathers and bills were reportedly used in rituals by the Tepheuana and Huichol tribes in the south of Durango.

Increasing effort in conservation biology is being devoted to the analysis of the extinction risk as well as the search for the rare, long unseen, species.

[8] 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.

Gallagher suspects that such a campaign of poisoning may be the key to the species' apparent catastrophic population crash in the 1950s, which has hitherto lacked a satisfactory explanation.

In Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, there are major marijuana and opium poppy-growing regions that are patrolled by armed guards.