The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Long thought extinct, the elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker may yet live. In 1999, the birding community was galvanized at the news of a sighting by a hunter in a Louisiana forest. A series of expeditions continue to search for the rare bird, and all seekers rely on this elegant treatise by James Tanner that was first published by the National Audubon Society in 1942, when a few of the species could still be found in the cypress and bottomland forests of the southern United States. It opens with a general description (explaining how to distinguish the Ivory-Bill from its more commonly encountered cousin, the Pileated Woodpecker), and offers an extensive profile of the species' other characteristics and habits, including its original distribution patterns, the history of its disappearance, and its feeding, nesting, and breeding habits.