COLUMN: An extinct woodpecker, back from the dead?

A colorized rendition of a photograph taken by Arthur Allen of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker at a nest in Louisiana’s Singer Tract, 1935. (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

After almost eight decades without a confirmed sighting in the U. S. the federal government declared the ivory-billed woodpecker “extinct” last September.

The ivory-billed woodpecker was the largest in North America. It may still be. Three widely acclaimed efforts to find living ivory-bills in the early 2000s disappointed…