THE story has all the features of a boys’ adventure yarn. The ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest and most magnificent of its tribe, goes missing at the end of the second world war and is presumed extinct. But rumours persist that a few birds remain in the swampy forests of America’s Deep South, like soldiers hiding on remote Pacific islands, unaware that the war is over.
Tim Gallagher, a natural history editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, heads south to see if the rumours are true. He interviews everyone who claims to have seen an ivory-billed…
