The knock-knock sounds recorded and replayed with such hope last January by ornithologists searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers turn out not to be bird noises at all. They’re gunshots, according to researchers at the Cornell (N.Y.) Laboratory of Ornithology.
An international team of bird experts spent a month last winter combing Louisiana’s Pearl River Wildlife Management Area for signs that the charismatic woodpecker, which had not been seen for years, had somehow escaped extinction (SN: 3/2/02, p.
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