Originally published at: Iconic bird, thought to be extinct, turns up in Louisiana | Boing Boing
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Good Lord!
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This is very exciting if true! Birders have been looking for it for generations.
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This is a running gag at this point. There have been sightings in Louisiana periodically for my whole life. Every time the local birder has been told they were wrong, because it’s “extinct”
When it was declared extinct, they acknowledged that there had been dozens of reported sightings in recent years by birders but apparently the internet isn’t the only place with a rule of “pics or it didn’t happen”
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I hope they’re careful with their observations.
Aren’t those birds supposed to be extraordinarily skittish, to the point of abandoning nests if observers get too close or stay in the area too long?
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And… It’s extinct again
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I seem to remember an episode of NOVA or some similar show where they delved into the possibility after a sighting (I thought the sighting was in AR but maybe I’m mistaken.)
This idea that they live in the tops of the canopy in dense forests would indicate why nobody could find them. Probably human trophy-hunting was an evolutionary pressure where some birds learned the best way to avoid us, and once we decided they were extinct it allowed the remaining population to grow.
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You’d think they’d mention that over the years people have sometimes mistaken a similar looking species, pileated woodpeckers, for ivory-bills.
Ivory-bills, or a close subspecies, were also found in Cuba until much more recently: Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker - Wikipedia
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Someone even more pedantic than I could ever possibly be will undoubtedly be along in a while to prove that “again” to be far from the correct word.
It’s what they do 
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The paper goes into great detail regarding how the observed specimens can be distinguished from similar species. Quoting one passage:
Comparative photos of other birds in the same tree taken by the same camera (Figure 5), including an unidentified small woodpecker, a Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus ), and a Red-headed Woodpecker, confirm the large size of the putative Ivorybill. The angle of the bird’s back to the bole of the tree (~50°) is greater than commonly seen in Pileated Woodpeckers and may reflect the pamprodactyl condition of the Ivorybill (Bock & Miller, 1959; see below), and be characteristic of that species. While the image quality is too poor for precise measurement, the relatively long neck aspect ratio, proposed as characteristic of the Ivorybill (Luneau, 2021), is also highly suggestive, and evident as distinct from Pileated Woodpeckers in many of the photographs taken in the 1930s by Allen and Kellogg (1937) and Tanner (1942).
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You’re right. They mention the Cuban population too.
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Another vote for the Lord God Bird (see: The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, by Tom Gallant.)
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… I’m going extinct RIGHT NOW 
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If only that ever worked.
I’m being pedantic right now
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No, that was facetious, just then.
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