-descriptive notes by Scott Weidensaul and John James Audubon

What's black and white and red all over, and no one ever sees?

On April 1, 1999 (a date that has not gone un-remarked), a Louisiana State University forestry and wildlife student named David Kulivan came back from a hike in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Reserve with some news that he was not at all sure about sharing.

Would anyone believe him?

And what if he was wrong?

On February 11, 2004, Gene M. Starling III took his kayak into the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas and came out with news that he did share . . . and the people he told knew who to tell . . . and those people brought dozens of folks to Arkansas over the next fourteen months because of what Starling had shared.

They were sworn to secrecy.

David Kulivan and Gene Starling are a few of the lucky people still living who may have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, a 20-inch-long, black, red, and white bird with a 30-inch wing span that has been pronounced extinct a dozen times in the past hundred years.

And that was why no one would believe that anyone had just seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. Two hundred years ago there were tens of thousands of them living in the American South. But as the forests they lived in were cut away, the birds became fewer and fewer, and sightings became rarer, and more fleeting, and less believable.

But people wanted to believe. Back and forth, pro and con, yes and no; for a hundred years we haven't been able to shake ourselves free of the hope that the ivory-billed woodpecker is still with us. It's gone . . . somewhere. It must be hiding.

Because of the ivorybill, 85,000 acres in Texas were put aside to become Big Thicket National Park in 1966.

Because of the ivorybill, Congaree Swamp in South Carolina became Congaree National Park in 2003.

Because of the ivorybill, the Department of the Interior earmarked $ 10 million for a "Corridor of Hope" (to protect habitat) in 2005.

-R.P.

On April 28, 2005, Science magazine published an article authored by 17 naturalists, among them experts from the world-respected Cornell Lab of Ornithology, stating that the ivory-billed woodpecker was indeed alive in the Big Woods of Arkansas.

By spring of 2006, ornithologists had publicly spoken out against the announcement, suggesting ultimately that the recent sightings of ivorybills were in doubt. The trees they were said to have torn up just. . . fell apart naturally. The sounds they were said to have made were just... someone tapping (bam-bam!) on the hull of a boat. The numerous eye-witness reports were just wishful thinking. The video . . . was just of a pileated.

How come we don't know if the ivory bill is extinct or not? How come can't make up our minds?

In any search for treasure, people are susceptible to strange effects. They see what they want to see. They want to accomplish what they set out to do; they want to meet others' expectations. They get compulsive about sharing their opinion, as if much depends on it. Sometimes they are inspired by a childhood dream, by a certain way they feel the world ought to turn out.

Or, as Don Moser wrote in a Life magazine article on the ivory-billed woodpecker in 1972, "If the question of its existence remains unanswered, it will continue to range the back country of the mind, and those who wish to trail it there can find it in their visions."

The debate that was sparked by a fleeting glimpse of a single bird and that raged for two years was not the last chapter in the story. In September of 2006, Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University in Alabama, and Daniel Merrill of the University of Windsor, Ontario, published a paper in a science journal: they had evidence of ivory-billed woodpeckers in Florida, around the Choktawhatchee River.

Everyone agrees it would be a shame if the bird no longer exists, and a marvel if it does, and that there seems to be no way to decide.

"Once we found them, what was I supposed to do?" says Geoffrey Hill. "The mistake," he adds, "was ever looking for them."

-R.P

© 2008 Carus Publishing Company Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.