Nature, updating a “recovery” plan for the ivory billed woodpecker, paints a bleak picture about the bird’s existence and raises questions about spending on the search and recovery.

In 2005, a team reported1 videotaping an ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) in eastern Arkansas, in what seemed to be the first documented sighting of a creature thought to have become extinct at least 50 years earlier. Other experts have challenged the claim, although the team members maintain that they spotted one bird.

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But after five years of fruitless searching, hopes of saving the species have faded. “We don’t believe a recoverable population of ivory-billed woodpeckers exists,” says Ron Rohrbaugh, a conservation biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who headed the original search team.

The FWS has spent $14 million trying to document and conserve the ivory-billed woodpecker throughout the southeast United States, including $8 million for habitat preservation and $2 million for search-associated costs. The hunt was suspended last October after it ran out of money. Chasing down a string of dubious and faked claims of sightings added an extra burden, undermining already-stressed wildlife programmes, experts say.

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