OF ALL THE ENVIRONMENTAL HORRORS wrought by our destruction of the great forests of the South, the near-annihilation of the ivorybill is one of the most egregious. The largest woodpecker in North America, it stands just shy of two feet tall, talon to crest, with a three-foot wingspan and a sturdy white dagger of beak. The male wears a backswept vermilion crest radiating all the iconic power of a shark fin, and bolts of white plumage zigzag up its neck, as if poised to skewer its baleful golden eyes. The ivorybill's nickname is "the Lord God Bird." It's difficult, according to those who'd know, to behold the creature without being seized by the urge to roar, "Lord God, what a bird!"

Over the years, the creature's splendor has gotten it into trouble. Even before Columbus, Native Americans killed ivorybills in quantity, using the bird's vibrant feathers to jazz up their personal plumage. According to Phillip Hoose, author of 2004's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, Indians also carried around little sachets of crushed ivorybill heads, hoping it might help them poke holes in their enemies. In the early 19th century, frontier tchotchke hawkers sold ivorybill heads as souvenirs. Before cameras, ornithologists didn't simply watch birds; they shot them. So a species's fondest admirers could be among its greatest threats. (In 1820, Audubon himself killed three and used them as models for one of his paintings, which shows the birds gang-harassing a black beetle.) Collectors paid top dollar for stuffed ivorybills; one Victorian naturalist cherished the birds so highly that he accumulated 61 specimens in his private inventory. Hungry backwoods philistines simply ate them.

According to one account, though, ivorybills didn't surrender without a fight. In 1809, Scottish ornithologist Alexander Wilson shot one in a North Carolina swamp but only grazed it, to his later regret. He brought the wounded bird back to his hotel room, where it chiseled a 15-inch hole in the wall. He then tied it to a mahogany table, which it quickly pecked to chips. When Wilson tried to restrain it, he was gored bloodily and repeatedly. The bird expired after three days on hunger strike.

The ivory-billed woodpecker's Latin title is Campephilus principalis, which translates approximately to "number-one caterpillar aficionado." The bird's fussy diet—beetles and grubs that dwell deep in the subdermis of ailing old-growth trees—depends on huge forests with enough old trees to support a healthy population of wood-boring insects. But in the aftermath of the Civil War, southern forests, their inhabitants be damned, suffered the most brutal massacre ever inflicted on an American wetland ecosystem, disappearing in the advance of metastasizing railroads, satisfying the nation's surging appetite for lumber and clear-cut farmland. Timber companies scalped mammoth tracts—some bought for as little as 12 cents an acre—and milled the ancient trees into wood for house frames, ammunition crates, automobile chassis, and coffins. Many of the bottomland forests in the upper South were razed entirely. Logging firms descended like locusts on the Big Woods, which once spanned 24 million contiguous acres across seven states. When the sawdust cleared, only 4.4 million scattered acres of habitat remained.

In the thirties, Cornell ornithologist James Tanner discovered 13 ivorybills in one of the last remaining islands of habitat, known as the Singer Tract, an 81,000-acre forest in northeastern Louisiana that the Singer company had been slowly turning into cabinets for its sewing machines. But in 1937, Singer sold the forest to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, which resisted conservationists' entreaties and destroyed the woods. In 1944, illustrator Don Eckelberry sketched a solitary female ivorybill roosting in an ash tree on the edge of the ruins. Outside of rumors and unconfirmed reports, the bird would not be positively identified by another person until Gene Sparling came along.