Extinct, or Not? | God's World News
Extinct, or Not?
News Shorts
Posted: May 19, 2023
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    An ivory-billed woodpecker specimen on a display at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California (AP/Haven Daley)

Spotted: the long-lost ivory-billed woodpecker!

Well . . . maybe.

U.S. lawmakers have a decision to make. Should they declare the ivory-billed woodpecker extinct?

It seems like an easy choice. An ivory-billed woodpecker would be hard to miss. Its wings spread out longer than two feet. Its call sounds like a bicycle horn. Surely if any remained in the wild, people would know about them. Right?

For a long time, many agreed that no one had seen an ivory-bill since 1944. But now new video and photographs taken in Louisiana may show two more.

The images are grainy. They were taken from a distance by drones and trail cameras. They hint that the large woodpecker may yet exist.

Some say the photos are the real thing. But others say the footage shows pileated woodpeckers, which are often mistaken for ivory-bills. The bird pair appear to have black-and-white coloring on the wings, just like ivory-bills. But critics say the white just comes from glare from the Sun.

Read about “the library of dead birds,” then play this matching game to learn which birds are most plentiful on Earth.

For He looks to the ends of the Earth and sees everything under the heavens. — Job 28:24