Ah, an inconvenient woodpecker!
Most of the birdwatching press has come down on the side that the bird is still about in Arkansas, though, of course, very hard to sight. The book “The Grail Bird” gives a nice account of the history of sightings and the more current attempts to prove recent sightings.
And ya, the name “Lord Almighty Bird” is very fitting. In Houston, I lived near a bird sanctuary with a couple of mating pairs of pileated woodpeckers, the ivory-billed’s smaller cousin. They still looked like pterydactyls in the sky, so I can imagine the words “Lord almighty!” coming easily to anyone seeing the ivory-billed.
Sad to note that both the pileated and ivory-billed were dwarfed by the Imperial woodpecker of Mexico, last seen in the 1960s, another victim of habitat loss, though the last remaining of that species seemed to have met another fate. One researcher, visiting the mountainous area where the Imperial lived, asked if the people knew why they had disappeared. One man of the village simply said, “There were these huge, beautiful birds in the trees. We had guns. What do you think happened?”