Winged Hope: Professor Says Ivory-billed Woodpecker Not Extinct Anniston Star

Considered "the Holy Grail of the birding world," the ivory-billed woodpecker was supposedly last seen alive, "beyond a doubt," in the 1940s, but Auburn University professor Geoff Hill claims to have seen the bird in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle in 2005 and 2006. And Hill, the professor of ornithology at Auburn University, is an expert on birds, having written several books, including one on the ivory-billed woodpecker. But Hill and his team weren't the only experienced birders who claimed to see the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Florida Panhandle. Wildlife artist John Agnew and south Florida birder Sally Wolliver both claimed a sighting on an expedition in 2008. Is the ivory-billed woodpecker still living? Elsewhere, the question of whether a creature is living or not comes up, again, in the title of the new book by cryptozoologists Mark A. Hall and Loren Coleman,True Giants: Is Gigantopithecus Still Alive?, critiqued by Cameron McCormick inBook Review: True Giants. Meanwhile, a recent posting on Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog set Dr. Karl Shuker to remembering his own contribution to the subject of the supposedly mythological little folk and the possibility the legends described people with a particular genetic condition, as Dr. Shuker explains in The Genetics of Fairies? Also, two episodes of a worldwide search for reported cryptids to associate with different countries are offered by Glen Vaudrey in The Whole Wide World (the Missing Bits).

Review: Nite Callers Radio 3-13-11