The Biggest Story in the World ne morning I got a call from a friend inside the Nature Conservancy who asked me, first off, if I could keep an incredibly huge secret. We all know the answer to that question. Breathlessly, he told me that his organization was sitting on one of the most amazing stories in history and would I be interested? I’m not sure I even got to answer that one. He immediately told me that a team was on the ground in a primeval cypress swamp in Arkansas and that they had found the ivory-billed woodpecker. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the critter other than that the very name, like the yellow-bellied sapsucker’s, was cartoon shorthand for bird nut. I typically avoid daily journalism, especially announcement stories (New Asian Weasel Discovered!), because I’ve spent most of my life in weekly or monthly magazines and breaking news was always tantalizingly out of reach. But this one was different; there was time. So I asked him to let me check it out and immediately sped off to learn that, yes, this was North America’s largest woodpecker, but it also came with a backstory so bizarre, epic, covert, and overwrought that if we included birds among mythic Americans, the ivory-bill would keep company with Charles Foster Kane and Jay Gatsby.
