Echoes from the Ivory-bill

I've never been quite convinced the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is extinct.  
It may be wishful thinking, or it may be that a story I heard 20 years ago lingers in my mind.  I was in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science talking to a woman sculpting an elk.  The story she told me is that years after the last supposed confirmation of the ivory-bill (1950, Florida) she'd been a girl of about 10 hiking in the Singer Tract in Louisiana. Her father put a finger to his lips to shush her and pointed to a magnificent red, white, and black bird on a stump in front of them. The witness, Ruth Laws (or Lowes: I didn't write down the spelling and haven't been able to locate her) said her father whispered, "That is an ivory-billed woodpecker. Take a good look, because you'll never see one again." She never did.
This bird may be extinct. It may very well be functionally extinct - that is, there are some individuals, but not enough to continue the species.  People like Michael Collins of the Naval Research Laboratory spend years of their lives searching for the birds.
Collins thinks he's found them. 
His videos, according to other experts, are not definitive: the birds in them could be ivory-bills, but they are too far from the camera to tell, so they might also be pileated woodpeckers, although the behavior certainly fits.
There are good reasons we all want the bird to be found. The nickname "Lord God bird" was applied based on the exclamations of countless witnesses. One admiring  expert, ornithologist Dr. Lester Short, wrote that, "If the woodpecker world had royalty, the ivory⌐bill would be king."
The bird had a specialized diet, based on beetles living in dying or recently dead trees in Southern forests. When these forests were cleared, the birds had a difficult - maybe impossible - task in adapting to secondary growth. 
Still, reports lingered - in Florida, in Arkansas, and in other states. Ornithologist John V. Dennis had a good sighting in East Texas in 1966.  Dr. Jerome Jackson got responses to recordings of ivory-bills in 1987 and 1988.  In Cuba, a bird was conclusively identified in 1986, although an extensive search in 1993 found nothing, and that seems to have been the last of the Cuban birds (sometimes considered a separate subspecies).  (Or was it? Ornithologist Tim Gallagher led an expedition to the island in 2016, although proof remained elusive.) 
In April 1999, David Kulivan, a graduate student in wildlife biology, spotted a pair in Louisiana's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area. The sighting was convincing enough to result in a major search, without luck. The Louisiana  Ornithological Society put out an ivory-bill T-shirt captioned, "I Want To Believe," a mantra from the The X-Files.In 2004, a sighting and video from Arkansas led to the official announcement of the bird's rediscovery by U.S. government authorities. (The result, published in the leading journal Science, might be the most famous paper ever published about birds.) The identity of the bird in the video has since been questioned, though and the species, once again, seems to have disappeared.   
And so it goes - scattered reports, calls, distant images and videos. The ivory-bill has become the sasquatch of the bird world - widely sought, wiedely believed in, but not quite there in evidence the scientific world can widely accept.
I think it's still there.
Because I want to.

A partial ivory-bill bibliography:

Anonymous.  1993.  "Ivory-billed woodpecker extinct," Oryx, October.

Editors, “The Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Heads to Cuba,” Audubon, April 11, 2016, http://www.audubon.org/news/the-quest-ivory-billed-woodpecker-heads-cuba

Cadieux, Charles L.  1991. Wildlife Extinction. Washington, D.C.: Stonewall Press.

Caras, Roger A.  1966.  Last Chance on Earth. Philadelphia: Chilton Books.

Cokinos, Christopher.  2000.  Hope is the Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.  Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. 

Discovery News, "Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Search Ends," April 15, 2010, http://www.seeker.com/ivory-billed-woodpecker-search-ends-1765044685.html

Fitzpatrick, John, et. al., “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America,” Science, June 3, 2005, v.308, p.1460

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/evidence/ScienceArticle05.pdf

Hoose, Philip. 2004.  The Race to Save the Lord God Bird.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Jackson, Jerome. 2004.  In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian. 

Jackson, Jerome. 2002.  “The Truth is Out There,” Birder’s World, June, p.40

Lammertink, Martjan, Kenneth V. Rosenberg, John W. Fitzpatrick, M. David Luneau, Jr., Tim W. Gallagher, Marc Dantzker. “Detailed analysis of the video of a large woodpecker (the "Luneau video") obtained at Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, Arkansas, on 25 April 2004,” February 8, 2006, http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/evidence/segments/segments/intro

Louisiana Ornithological Society.  2000.  "Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Sightings at Pearl River WMA?" LOS News, February.

Martel, Brent.  2000.  "Birder Says He Saw Rare Woodpecker," Associated Press, November 4.

Mayell, Jillary.  2002.  “’Extinct Woodpecker Still Elusive,” National Geographic News, http://news.nationalgeographic.com, February 20.

Short, Lester.  1993. The Lives of Birds. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Short, Lester, and Jennifer Horne.  1986.  "The Ivorybill Still Lives," Natural History, July.