This essay was originally published on TomDispatch.

Out of the Woods: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Like so many goofily gorgeous North American species, the ivory-billed woodpecker seems to have been designed by a cartoonist. It's bigger and showier than even the hefty pileated woodpecker, with a white bill, brilliant black-and-white markings and, on the males, a Mohawk-like red crest--and it had been presumed extinct for decades. The last confirmed US sighting was back when Roosevelt was President, Jim Crow was the de facto law of the south, Bing Crosby was big and Elvis was 9. In 1944, an Audubon Society artist had sketched what was believed to be the last surviving stateside bird as the trees around its Louisiana nesting site were cut down. The bird had already disappeared from most of its once-wide range, stretching from Cuba to Illinois and Oklahoma. (The last substantiated Cuban sighting was in 1988, when Reagan was President and Armageddon had only recently seemed a likelihood.)

Over the ensuing decades, some hoped that ornithological orthodoxy was wrong--including birder and editor Tim Gallagher, who became obsessed with "the grail bird" (as he calls it in his recent book) and pursued faint traces and rumors of sightings across the American South. A birder, Mary Scott, who had devoted herself to looking for extinct birds--a believer in faint hopes and unlikely possibilities, in other words--spotted the woodpecker in 2003 and prompted Gallagher to begin searching northeast Arkansas. He saw the male bird for himself in March 2004 and launched a secret project with the Cornell Ornithological Laboratory and Arkansas Nature Conservancy to confirm his sighting and protect the bird's habitat. (Whether that male is, as the female spotted in 1944 was thought to be, the last of its kind is still not known.) Gallagher's hope led him on as the rumors of the project began to spread in April of this year. The sightings and soundings--for the call of the ivory-billed is distinct--were made public on April 28.

The old certainty that the bird didn't exist was replaced by a fragile new knowledge that it did, news that arrived in a flood of scientists' tears--the accounts of those who first saw the bird are drenched in shuddering emotion. Ornithologists everywhere were happy to have been so wrong for so long. (Imagine if political pundits were half so happy to admit error, how interesting political discourse might get; but no Naderites came back to admit that there were actually a few key differences between Bush and Gore; nor general alarmists to remind us that Y2K was a big nonstarter; and few conservatives have owned up to the fact that a war on Iraq turned out not to be easy and fun after all--though many newspapers have admitted that most of the post-Katrina murder and mayhem reported in New Orleans was imaginary.)

The reappearance of the woodpecker seems like a second chance--a chance to expand its habitat, to get it right this time. Maybe that's what links the big surprises of 2005, this sense that there can be another unexpected round, the tenth inning in which the outcome could be different; that failure and devastation are not always final. Scott Simon, the Arkansas Nature Conservancy director who, with Cornell University scientists, led the search for the woodpecker, writes, "It is sometimes said that faith requires the suspension of belief. In this case, belief has been rewarded with reality. The fact is, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker survives. What a great outcome for decades of faith, hope, and prayers."

The woodpecker was a spectacular thing unto itself, but also a message that we don't really know what's out there, even in the forests of the not-very-wild Southeast, let alone the ocean depths from which previously uncatalogued creatures regularly emerge. Late last month, University of Alaska marine biologists found seven new species during an expedition under the arctic ice that uncovered a much richer habitat with far more fauna than anticipated. Of course, the other animal news from the arctic is the threat to the porcupine caribou herd if the Bush Administration succeeds in opening the Eisenhower-created Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and the widespread drowning of polar bears, because the distance between summer ice floes and land is now often farther than even they can swim.

The woodpecker is a small story; the big environmental story of our time is about extinctions and endangerments, about creatures and habitats moving toward the very brink this bird came back from; but this small story suggests that there are still grounds to hope--to doubt that we truly know exactly what is out there and what is possible. Hope is not history's Barcalounger, as is often thought: It requires you get back out there and protect that habitat or stop that war. It is not the same as optimism, the belief that everything will probably turn out all right despite your inactivity, the same kind of inactivity that despair begets. Hope involves a sense of possibility, but with it comes responsibility.

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