Truth
of the Day 
Excite News
Service - Affiliate
T
0 P
(excerpted from The New York Times Editorial page)
ere
are the reasons to be impressed by the ivory-billed woodpecker, which has
emerged like a feathered ghost from the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas more
than a half-century after its presumed extinction.
It's huge and beautiful. "A whacking big bird," Roger Tory Peterson wrote, nearly two feet long with a three-foot wingspan, black and white with a streak of red on the male's pterodactyl crest and a fearsome glint in its yellow eyes. To see an ivory-bill left people thunderstruck; their exclamations inspired its nickname: the Lord God bird.
It's alive. The word miracle is overused, but what else explains the survival in the 21st century of an animal considered lost to history so long ago? The ivory-bill was mourned as a mythologized victim of intense predation and habitat loss, of hunters and collectors, of the leveling of millions of acres of Southern forests into pulp and sawdust. Somehow it has endured.
It is an environmental wonder worker. The ivory-bill has had an awesome hold on people's imaginations, to the immense benefit of the environment. In the 1970's, after an Audubon official reported merely hearing the bird in a South Carolina swamp, the state spared 10,000 acres from clear-cutting. More recently, an unconfirmed sighting led to a logging moratorium in Louisiana. The ivory-bill's return is especially sweet to conservationists in Arkansas, where it could help protect the rivers and swamps in the Big Woods, a poor but lush part of Arkansas that one local environmentalist calls "our Everglades, our Yellowstone."
The struggle to preserve the natural environment is one of crushed hopes and excruciating wistfulness. But not always. The ivory-billed woodpecker is a living monument to the stubbornness of all creatures that refuse to be erased, despite all our blundering and destructive habits. Its odd nickname is a fitting tribute: not "Wow," "Geez" or "Check it out," but "L