On an overcast October morning in 2021, self-taught ornithologist Mark A. Michaels was staking out a sweetgum tree in a Louisiana forest when he spotted a bird flying below the canopy about 50 yards away. Based on the bird’s size and long neck, Michaels first presumed he was looking at a duck. But then he noticed it intermittently tucking its wings during flight, something he says that ducks don’t do—but woodpeckers do. “Ivory-bill!” he recalls shouting, now certain that the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a species that hasn’t been definitively identified in the wild since 1944, and one that he’d been seeking for about 15 years.
Michaels, a research associate at the National Aviary, has had several possible ivory-bill encounters, including at that same tree, but he couldn’t fully convince himself of their authenticity. This sighting was different. “That was really the first time I was absolutely ...
