Remora

Limited Inc reads the newspapers for much the same reasons that hard shell Baptists listen to hellfire sermons -- to produce a feeling of dys-empathy, an odd combination of melancholy and self satisfaction. Our love for all humanity is tempered by our satisfaction that humanity is being lead into various unbelievable disasters by the most greedy and dimwitted among us. Going to hell in a handbasket kind of thing, you know.
But sometimes, sometimes an item peeks through the gloom like a ray of golden sunshine. The best news in the NYT is in the science section today. No way to say this without a tremor of emotion in the voice: the Ivory Billed Woodpecker may STILL BE ALIVE!

"[] team that spent 30 days in a swampy Louisiana forest looking for a woodpecker long thought to be extinct reported yesterday that members may have heard the bird, but they did not see it."

The ivory billed woodpecker isn't simply a bird, but like the dodo, the great auk, the eskimo curlew, it is a totem, a dream image, an Audubon revery.

Some might call the evidence slim.

"On Jan. 27, at 3:30 p.m., four of the six members of the search team, in an undisclosed spot in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La., heard a series of double raps characteristic of the drumming of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They managed to record the last double- rap of the sequence and some subsequent rapping.On the same day, members of a Cornell Lab of Ornithology research group heard a similar sound in the same area, and two days later, other members of the team heard loud rapping uncharacteristic of other woodpeckers. "

Oddly enough, the NYT doesn't mention that the last sighting of the species in toto was in Cuba.

In 1985, Dr. Lester Short obtained permission to Search for C. principalis in Cuba. That year he, together with George Reynard and Giraldo Alay�n, visited the Cupeyal reserve just west of the area of the 1956 sightings. No woodpeckers were observed but they found fresh marks of a foraging C. principalis and heard of a report from December 1984 in the area (14). Giraldo Alay�n and Alberto Estrada continued the Search in

"October 1985 and March 1986 (15) and followed George Lamb's 1956 route. Although the forest close to the coast, near Moa, appeared long gone, the species was apparently still present in Ojito de Agua, one of the most inland territories described by Lamb. On 13 March Alberta Estrada briefly saw a single C. principalis. Giraldo Alay�n then observed a female being attacked by two Cuban Crows, Corvus nasicus, on 16 March and in April that year an international team including Dr. Lester Short, Dr. Jennifer Horne and George Reynard saw at least one male and one female at the same spot (15). One year later, in the afternoon of 16 March 1987, an observation was made that would appear to be the very last positive record of the species. Giraldo Alay�n and Aim� Pasada saw a female woodpecker flying at a distance of about 200 m. A National Geographic expedition in 1988 which included Ted Parker and Jerome Jackson could not find the species, although an individual might have been glimpsed (7)."