(editor'snote)

About three weeks before Audubon went to press, one of our writers sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Story of the Century.” It turned out that for 14 months Rachel Dickinson had been sitting on the kind of scoop that in the old, green-eyeshade days of newspapers made editors yell “Stop the presses!” She told me an ivory-billed woodpecker had been found in Arkansas. At Audubon we had chased this phantom before, so at her suggestion, I called her husband, Tim Gallagher, who was about to release a book called The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. By the time the news broke, Dickinson's insider's account for Audubon was well under way for this issue (“The Best-Kept Secret”).

At the office, we huddled around one another's desks to share the latest news flashes and e-mails. All of us in the conservation world feel blessed by this opportunity to reverse the course of history and, perhaps, rescue this magnificent bird from oblivion. Its reemergence stiffens our resolve to preserve habitat and control pesticides for the sake of other species clinging to life.

We must also address the dicey issue of controlling deer populations that are laying waste to the vegetation that many bird species depend on for their survival (“Public Menace”). The last time we tackled the deer problem, about three years ago, I received hate mail unfit for a family publication. Tom Baptist, Audubon Connecticut's executive director, faced the same backlash two years ago after starting a deer hunt—as a last resort—at the Greenwich Audubon Center, where's he based. (Contraceptives are, so far, impractical, and reintroducing predators, unrealistic.) “The change to the forest ecology has been significant,” he says. “The forest is essentially denuded of understory plants, with the exception of just a few.” As a result every species of ground- and shrub-nesting bird formerly present on the property, save for the turkey, is absent. Birds such as the black-and-white warbler, the ovenbird, and the eastern towhee, have simply vanished. During the hunt's first season, Tom received in the mail an Audubon cap with an arrow through it and a note attached to the brim, demonizing him. With Tom enjoying strong local support, the furor has since died down, and the long process of restoring native plants, which may take decades, has begun.

Many in the animal-rights community believe it's cruel and inhumane to hunt deer. But what about all the birds losing their homes and having nowhere to reproduce? Are they any less deserving of protection than deer, whose numbers are soaring, not plummeting? The problem is that humans have so radically altered the planet that these hard ecological trade-offs are sometimes necessary.

The ivory-bill's return has raised hopes for a “second chance.” Let's not lose sight of all the first chances, as well.