Lost and found

Environment | Reports of a famous bird's demise were greatly exaggerated | Jamie Dean

Deep in the swamps of the bottomland forest of northern Arkansas, a jet-black woodpecker with a three-foot wingspan and an ivory-colored bill changed Timothy Gallagher's life. It had been 61 years since the last confirmed sighting of one the largest woodpeckers in the world, and most ornithologists considered the Ivory-billed Woodpecker extinct. When the enigmatic creature swooped 70 feet in front of Mr. Gallagher's canoe on a February morning in 2004, he and other Cornell University ornithologists changed their minds. After a year of intense searching that yielded six separate sightings and a four-second video of a male Ivory-billed Woodpecker landing on a tupelo tree, scientists announced to the world last month that the lost bird had been found.