IBWO article in Louisiana Wildlife News

A reader writes:

Louisiana State University Agricultural Center publishes Louisiana Wildlife News:

"Louisiana Wildlife News is a bi-monthly publication intended to serve as an outlet for wildlife issues relevant to Louisiana and the Southeast. In addition to current news events, profiles on specific plant, wildlife and nuisance wildlife species are included in each issue."

The January 2007 issue (PDF) contains the following telling passages (which surely must have been written since the Sept. Auburn announcement):

"No confirmed sightings of the Ivory-billed woodpecker have occurred in more than a year, and various ornithologists are questioning the scientific validity of the original sightings in 2004 and 2005. Despite these setbacks, the federal government will soon have available a draft recovery plan to delineate desired habitat for the bird."

"The Ivory-billed woodpecker was (or is) the largest woodpecker in North America. There are reasons for confusion about whether to speak of it in present or past tense. Although the bird was thought extinct for more than 60 years, evidence was presented in 2005 that several sightings of it were made in 2004 and 2005 at the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. The sightings were credible enough at the time to be published in the scientific literature, accompanied by spec-tacular news releases on the events from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The lack of credible sightings since 2005, along with a growing scientific community that now doubts the validity of the original sightings, have made many once again go back to the belief that these birds are no longer present."

"Outside of a confirmed sighting in Cuba in 1948, no hard evidence had surfaced in almost 60 years on proof of the bird’s existence. The point that many scientists found so hard to accept was how a bird as prominent as the Ivory-billed woodpecker could survive in numbers so low that they went undetected for over a half century. Hanging on at the brink of extinction is seldom an option for species. Survivors will usually build up numbers sufficient enough to insure that the species will survive or go the way of the passenger pigeon and be remembered only by way of pictures and museum specimens. Unfortunately, with no new evidence of the birds’ existence in more than a year since the reported sightings in 2005, this indeed may be the case."