Yay!
That’s really all I have to say about it.
Hey, I heard that this morning on NPR. I’m from Arkansas originally, and I know of the area they’re talking about. The White River bottom land forest is wildlife heaven. It’s also very dense in some areas, so I can see how a species could go unnoticed there.
I wonder what other “extinct” species will turn up…
Isn’t that the stomping grounds of the Swamp Ape?
… or maybe Skunk Ape. I often get confused; it has been years since I bothered with any sasquatchery.
Maybe you’re thinking of the Fouke Monster. (Anyone remember The Legend of Boggy Creek ?) But that’s in SW Arkansas, not too far from Texarkana. The White River area (the wildlife refuge part) is in the east central part of the state.
Outstanding.
BTW, I believe Bigfoot is in Louisiana or Texas.
He’d blend right in with the population.
rimshot
But seriously, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a Carolina Parakeet showed up.
This is way cool.
I remeber the search a few years ago (after some reported hearings of songs)
Here is a GQ: Are there any other instances of recent extinct species that turned out to be non extinct? (ceolocanths don’t count since they weren’t thought to be recenetly extinct)
Brian
The Takahe is one.
And this is huge news about the ivory-billed woodpecker - easily among the most significant events in US ornithology of the past 40 years.
A better bet would be an eskimo curlew or Bachman’s warbler.
Okay, now the pressure is on our Tasmanian/Australian friends to find a thylacine!
Dammit, Bobby! 
I was going to pipe up about the thylacine. That would just be too awesome.
Isn’t this the coolest? Here’s alink to an old NPR story that got me excited about it: http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2002/march/
It’s good news. It also throws cold water on the idea that destroying an animal’s only known habitat will cause its extinction. How many species will just shrug and say, “Well, Maude, here come the loggers. :eek: I guess I’ll just die?” Most critters are pretty resourceful when it comes to survival.
The fact of our ignorance does not equal non-existance. A certain species of leaf-hopper in Alaska probably had been around for centuries when my Uncle Gene “discovered” it. What he actually did was to document that it was different from any known species. Then he named it after himself. We don’t know what the bug called itself until then.
By the way, at 20 inches, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is one big woodpecker. About triple the size of the Downy ones we see in my backyard.
They’ve documented one.
Are you saying that we should just destroy habitat with reckless abandon because some animals will find something else? Did all those other thousands of species just go extinct on their own? 
Moving this one to IMHO, as there is NO question here.
That’s all I have to say. 
The trouble being that this is neither mundane nor pointless. It is, however, shared.
This is terrific news. I am absolutely ecstatic. It was only recently in this thread that I opined that this bird was gone forever. The paper that is being published with the official announcement can be found here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1114103v1.pdf
This is a joke, right?
This species could well still go extinct. They haven’t seen more than one bird at a time, in fact the authors freely admit they may have only seen the same bird several times rather than different individuals. They would need to find several breeding pairs in a contiguous protected habitat big enough to support them to even have a prayer of truly saving the species. At least I have some hope now.