Bye Bye, Birdie

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In April 2004, a computer and electronics professor named David Luneau paddled a canoe through a swamp forest in eastern Arkansas and captured a blurry video of a crow-sized bird perching on the trunk of a tupelo tree and then flying off into the woods. The bird had large white patches on the trailing edges of its wings and a vee of white stripes on its back—characteristic features of the ivory-billed woodpecker, last seen in the United States 60 years before and widely believed to be extinct.

Since then, numerous search parties have been launched to comb that patch of forest for more evidence of the bird’s existence, and scientists have been examining the video frame by frame and debating whether it really depicts an ivory billed woodpecker or just a more common, similar-looking pileated woodpecker. Has this lost creature revealed itself to human eyes again after six decades—or is the bird a figment of our wishful thinking? One thing is certain, says Duke University conservation biologist Stuart Pimm: “If it survives, it’s a lonely bird.”

Lonely, except that in one sense it has lots of company: species that are lost, or nearly so, are increasingly common because human activities are driving them to extinction a thousand times faster than…