No dodo:

Welcome back, ivory-billed woodpecker. It’s been about 60 years and a lot of people figured you were deader than the proverbial dodo. People were responsible for your presumed demise, destroying millions of acres of forested wetlands in the Mississippi Delta over the last century. Even after coming to their senses and creating the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas in the 1980s, they figured it was too late for you.

The seven 2004 sightings of your inestimable self in that refuge — documented by a team led by Dr John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — are cause for joyful tears throughout the birder world. You of the distinctive double-tap drum, commanding 20-inch stature, and 30-inch wingspan have become an instant media star. That’s heady, but dangerous.

“Don’t love this bird to death,” Interior Secretary Gale Norton warned the public at a press conference this week in Washington. She committed $10 million in federal funds for ivory-billed woodpecker protection. So, you’ve got their attention, but would probably like to tell them that their focus should extend to the rest of nature’s aviary. The once-prolific passenger pigeon and the great auk became extinct because people took them for granted. Today they are on a list of 100 birds that have vanished from the earth. So are Bachman’s warbler and the Eskimo curlew. — The Boston Globe