Comeback Bird

Tales from the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker

During the last week of April, an e-mail zinging through the bird-watcher community spilled the beans on one of the biggest and best-kept secrets in ornithology. It proclaimed that North America’s famed ivory-billed woodpecker was not extinct after all, but Terry Rich of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wasn’t excited. He had heard that story too many times before.