Ghost Bird

Shortly after the striking ivory-billed woodpecker—considered extinct since the 1920s—was memorialized in the award-winning book The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, a 2005 announcement appeared stating that the magnificent fowl had been sighted in a swampy nature preserve in eastern Arkansas, a claim that put the adjacent, economically plucked town of Brinkley in the international spotlight. But, as this docu-requiem relates, the joy over a lost species' resurrection dissipated as no further evidence materialized and ornithologists questioned the “proof”—an extreme digital-video enlargement of a bird in flight. Director Scott Crocker weaves the observations of both believers and skeptics within the scientific community—along with remarks from the Brinkley populace—into a well-crafted, multilayered story. Ghost Bird serves up a somewhat melancholy narrative that touches on a widespread avian extinction, the destruction of habitat, and the many beautiful creatures that exist now only as mummies in college and museum vaults (scientists killing and collecting the ivory-bill might have destroyed it as effectively as rampant corporate deforestation). But even outside of the birdwatcher-niche viewership and nature-video archives, the film also offers a transfixing cautionary tale of struggling Brinkley's hopes for rebirth as a birding boomtown, of the dubious squandering of funds on the ivory-bill instead of still-living animals on the brink of annihilation, and the tendency of some researchers toward self-deception and wishful thinking. DVD extras include bonus scenes. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)