The ghost hunter.

Tim Gallagher got his Eureka moment in the swamps of Arkansas on February 27, 2004. In his book The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (Houghton Mifflin, $25) this lifetime birder and magazine editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology writes about fulfilling a long-held dream: "And then it happened. Less than 80 feet away, a large black-and-white bird that had been flying toward us from a side channel of the bayou to the right came out into the sunshine and flew across the open stretch of water directly in front of us. It started to bank, giving us a superb view of its back and both wings ... We both cried out simultaneously, 'Ivory-bill.'" The rest, you might say, is history. A few months later, another Cornell researcher shot a fuzzy video of an ivory-bill, and the distinguished journal Science made it official. The grail bird, last reliably seen in 1944, was back. Gallagher's book makes exciting reading, capturing the hard work that led to a rediscovery that electrified the world. One hopes, after the news sinks in, we'll have the good sense to preserve the southern swamp forest habitat that this elusive bird needs for survival. If we had been smarter, we'd still have the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet.