WHEN THE SEARCHERS finally revealed to the world, in April 2005, that the ivorybill had risen from the ashes, it touched off a media frenzy the likes of which the birding world had never seen. Every news organ from CNN to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch trumpeted the sighting. It hit the front page and editorial section of The New York Times; 60 Minutes sent a crew to the swamp; and NPR aired so many stories on the woodpecker, it seemed to have been adopted as the network mascot.

What fueled the furor was the ecstatic sensation that, for once, nature had pardoned our trespasses against it and returned to us a marvel we had tried our damnedest to destroy. After years of depressing portents of annihilated species, of ice caps in retreat, of the Kyoto Protocol ignored, of levee-bound rivers hurling our coastal wetlands out to sea, our mental picture of the future had begun to look like an endless desert with a single lonely species—our own—treading the sands. The ivorybill allowed us to savor the rare hope that the damage dealt our planet is not so wholly irreparable as we've feared.

One evening last May, I sat with Ron Rohrbaugh, Cornell's director of ivorybill research, on the edge of the swamp, pondering the woodpecker's resurrection. "That this bird squeezed through this bottleneck of time and habitat devastation—to think it made it through all that time . . ." Here Rohrbaugh trailed off, and his eyes grew red and moist. "It's just . . . miraculous."

And the woodpecker's odds in Arkansas are getting better, not worse. Since February 2004, the Nature Conservancy, with help from partners, has acquired or optioned more than 18,500 acres of potential habitat, with designs on a total of 200,000 acres in the next decade, half of which are to be reforested.

At the moment, no part of the forest is off-limits to the public, though access to 5,000 acres around Bayou de View is strictly managed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife, which issues a handful of area permits each day. Duck hunters are welcomed. It may seem a bewildering policy to allow people to discharge shotguns within range of the world's rarest bird, but the folks at Cornell and TNC are quick to point out that the ivorybill wouldn't have survived if duck hunters, starting back in the thirties, hadn't led the fight to preserve the habitat, financing the state and federal purchase of 300,000 Big Woods acres and, via a six-year legal showdown in the seventies, preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from draining the swamp.

If a nest should turn up, the ivorybill effort will probably close off a half-mile cordon around the tree and maintain a cautious watch. But so far, no nest has revealed itself. Nor can the searchers say with any certainty that they've laid eyes on more than one bird; all positive sightings where sex could be determined have been of a male. (And, of course, he may have been the last of his kind, an omega man doomed to disappear beneath the bayou's coffee-colored waters.) So, right now, anything but watching and waiting is out of the question.

"Until we know we've got a viable population, captive breeding would be way too risky," says Rohrbaugh. After all, the measuring and weighing of a wild California condor chick in 1980 stressed the animal enough to kill it, and no one is eager to go down in history as the person whose well-intentioned bungling accidentally murdered the last of the ivorybills.

It's also possible that the bird's gene pool has withered so drastically that the remaining individuals are too severely inbred for long-term survival. But people like Tim Gallagher cling to a faith that the ivorybill will endure. Take the whooping crane, he says, which by the forties had dwindled to 15 creatures, and the condor, which bottomed out at just 22 wild birds in 1983; both species are now reproducing well, if only after millions upon millions of dollars spent resuscitating them. Gallagher believes the ivorybill may also still lurk in swamps in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida: "It's hard to say how many are out there, but I'm certain we didn't run into the last one in the world."