Those who know me well know that every spring I take a hunting trip for wild turkey. My travels have carried me to some far-flung destinations—true wilderness areas in the United States and Mexico as well as posh hunting lodges that border on being exclusive resorts. I have harvested an amazing array of different subspecies and species of wild turkey gobblers that culminated in my earning two wild turkey Grand Slams, two Royal Slams and one World Slam.

While these trips are treasured adventures that I look forward to every spring, this winter I may be going out after an entirely different kind of bird. And without a shotgun, no less.

The ivory-billed woodpecker is surrounded my romance, myth and legend. And they have recently been rediscovered living in Arkansas by a team of ornithologists from Cornell University after being presumed to be extinct for 60 years.

I became aware of the resurfacing of the ivory-billed woodpecker in April of this year, along with most other Americans who saw it on the six o’clock news.

The Cornell scientists in conjunction with state and federal wildlife agencies and The Nature Conservancy have been studying an area in northeast Arkansas since 2004. Yet somehow this hodgepodge of university, public and private groups managed to keep it secret.

My brother works for a private conservation agency. A lot of the work he does is in Arkansas in connection with the state’s Game and Fish agency and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

I called my brother as soon as I heard the news about the ivory-bills. Apparently, all those people could keep a secret very well, because he didn’t have a clue until the news went out on television and he was working in the same building with some of them!

My involvement was limited to that of an interested conservationist, excited to know that these magic birds could still exist in the wild. But for Christmas, I asked for a copy of Grail Bird, the book by Tim Gallagher about the re-discovery, and my brother complied—and then some. He also gave me a tee shirt and hat featuring the ivory-billed woodpecker that proudly proclaims FOUND. He said that he could get these autographed by the study team.

The icing on the cake was my sibling’s offer to "get me on the study site and put me in a blind" as a volunteer searcher at one of the study locations. And while the chances are extraordinarily small that I will see or hear an ivory-bill, the mere fact that the opportunity exists to see one of these birds is electrifying. Electrifying enough that I may forgo my annual rite of spring if time and money constraints require it.

I’d like to add that the main thing that drove rediscovery efforts was the fact that a turkey hunter in Louisiana reported a semi-believable ivory-billed sighting in 1999. And I’ll point out that hunters who were also birders joined the search team.

Gallagher noted that the hunters who joined the study team were an asset because they could move silently in the bayou and not only were they good at sitting still and quiet for hours, they actually enjoyed it.

After reading the book Grail Bird, I was struck about the differences between the way a hunter views the woods and the way a birder views the woods. Hunters, I think, are more in rhythm with the forest. We sit and become a part of the forest and our senses are honed to an incredible edge.

Birders and scientists tend to move through an area listening and looking in what I’ll perhaps erroneously call a "quick survey" format. I also have found that to be true with the herpetologists with whom I’ve logged some field time. In reading Grail Bird, it was obvious to me that these men and women were, in a way, strangers in the swamp. As I read, I saw their comfort level in their surroundings grow and mature as they became more in tune with them.

Here’s hoping that February 2006 finds me completely at ease in my well-worn and faded camo kayaking through a bayou and feeling, really feeling with all my senses—the wonder of the world around me.