On September 30, 2021, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service declared the Ivory-billed Woodpecker to be extinct, pending the completion of a 60-day public comment period and a final decision. Too much time has passed since anyone has been able to produce indisputable proof of the bird’s existence, the federal officials apparently reasoned, and it’s time to clear the decks and concentrate on the rare species that definitely do still exist. For me, this is a bitter pill to swallow—which is probably not surprising. You see, I was one of the people who sighted an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas in 2004 and a coauthor of the paper written for the journal Science the following year: “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America.” I also wrote The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and have personally searched for the Ivory-billed in Cuba, so I’m clearly in the “believer” camp. I often go back in...