"A bevy of amateur birders and professional ornithologists is racing to prove the ivory-billed woodpecker still exists, before federal officials remove it from the endangered species list"

"Steven Latta was trudging through the wet bottomlands of Louisiana when he spotted it: A flash of “brilliant white” rising toward the sky.

To him, the sight was unmistakable: It was the black-and-white plumage of an ivory-billed woodpecker.

“It really left me literally shaking,” said Latta, who directs conservation and field research at the National Aviary based in Pittsburgh.

The government, however, says the bird does not exist.

Last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to declare the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct. Decades of fruitless searches for the so-called “Lord God Bird,” the agency said, showed that it “no longer exists.”"

Dino Grandoni reports for the Washington Post December 19, 2022. [2]