THOUGH THE BIG WOODPECKER may be hard to come by out in the swamp, you can find thousands of them 15 minutes east of Bayou de View, in Brinkley, where the bird appears on billboards, commemorative platters, mobiles, key rings, and T-shirts advertised on roadside marquees along with cut-rate suitcases of beer.

It's oddly fortunate, for both the bird and its environs, that the ivorybill resurfaced in one of the poorest places in America. Locally, hopes run high that it could help reverse the fortunes of the long-downtrodden Delta towns via an influx of ecotourism dollars. And plummeting prices for soybeans, cotton, and rice have allowed the Nature Conservancy to snap up disused cropland at bargain-basement prices.

Emblems of a desperate hope for the bird's revival, and the money sure to follow, fairly overwhelm Brinkley (pop. 3,567) these days. The town's main drag now hosts the Ivory Billed Inn; the Ivory-Bill Nest, a gewgaw shop; a hair salon specializing in "woodpecker haircuts" (black and white finger paint slathered onto the forescalp and sides of the head, finished with a gelled red crest up top); and Gene's Barbecue, where the menu includes the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Burger, Salad, and Hot Fudge Brownie.

One day last spring, I stopped in on the mayor, Billy Clay, whose head was topped with an immaculate polygon of silver hair. "The saddest day in Brinkley is graduation, because we spend all that money putting them through school, then all the kids move on," he said, adding that, like the rest of the town's citizens, he was praying that the ivorybill might help deliver the place from destitution, though the riches weren't yet flooding in.

Fifteen miles south, Clarendon (pop. 1,859) was holding its annual Big Woods Birding Festival, a sort of miniature carnival nucleating around avian motifs. According to the advance press, the star of the show, the absent-in-flesh-only ivorybill, was to be improbably feted with, among other things, something called a "mini-lawnmower tractor pull," a fishing derby, and, apropos of crackpot obsessions and contested extinctions, a performance by an Elvis impersonator.

Clarendon sits on the White River, the Big Woods' main aquatic artery. Ambient conditions there approximated those at an open-air shvitz, and the atmosphere was suffused with the thick, diarrheal odor of decaying vegetable matter, courtesy of a sawmill on the outskirts of town. The aroma mingled now and again with sweet, grease-scented siroccos of funnel-cake smell drifting up from an undersized midway a few blocks down. TNC's Jay Harrod was walking along Main Street, inspecting the rear bumpers of parked cars. "I was looking for out-of-state tags," he said. "There don't seem to be any." Far-flung ivorybill seekers, aware that there was little hope in finding the refuge's most elusive inhabitant while the trees were green, had mostly stayed home.

Children wailed and brawled inside a huffing Moonwalk. Three bullish policemen stood fingering the butts of their revolvers, as though expecting a riot to erupt any minute. On the far side of the courthouse lawn, a couple from the Little Rock Zoo gave a presentation on birds of prey. The woman wore a tropical-print visor and narrated through a treble-heavy public-address system while her husband, a man with a head of frizzy red hair that looked like a disguise, milled through the crowd with a turkey vulture named Gomez perched on his forearm, which was gloved in a sort of talon-proof mukluk. The woman described how the vultures defecate on their legs to keep cool—and deter predators with impossibly noxious vomit. A man eating a barbecue sandwich turned ashen and stopped chewing. He looked up at the vulture, back at the sandwich, then resumed miserably.

I ran into Gene Sparling, who was on his way to give a presentation on the ivorybill at the American Legion Hall. I'd heard about a catfish fry happening later that night, and I asked if he was going. He said he'd be there but reminded me that we had a swamp-patrolling date scheduled for the crack of dawn, which I pointed out was going to cramp our style at the open bar.

"I know it," Sparling replied. "I was hoping I'd be able to get dead drunk and pass out somewhere." Then, seeming to remember his new status as a respectable member of the ornithological community, he quickly added, "Just kidding. Haven't done that in years. It'd probably kill me."

The couple from the zoo departed, and the imitation Elvis took the stage. A teenager stood looking on, nodding along with "G.I. Blues" and eating a dilute snow cone the color of boiled shrimp. Strapped to his feet were what appeared to be a pair of owls, his costume, he explained, for an upcoming performance of a tribal dance. I asked if he hoped to find the ivorybill.

"I heard they already found 'em," he said. "They got a bunch of 'em locked up."
"Who do?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said.