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Cover Legend: Mark Catesby (1682–1749), the Largest White-Bill Wood-Pecker (Image published with the author’s permission, from Alan Feduccia’s "Catesby’s Birds of Colonial America", University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1985). The large, ivory-billed woodpecker has been much in the news. A live specimen of this species, considered extinct since 1944, was sighted in Arkansas last year. Headlined in the New York Times (May 3, 2005) as "Hope on Wings" the woodpecker was also dubbed "the Lord God Bird." It had remained as silent as genes after RNAi for over half a century. Whether this ornithological finding is an example of miraculous rebirth, or simply a case of phenotypic error is under debate (Science 2006, 311:1555). The first sighting of the bird in print is attributed to Mark Catesby, an Englishman sent to America in 1712 to explore the flora and fauna of the southern colonies. After two long field trips, Catesby spent 20 years translating his drawings and observations into a two-volume edition of 220 hand-colored engravings accompanied by text–precedent for John James Audubon 100 years later. For this accomplishment, Catesby was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on May 3, 1733 and gained worldwide recognition. Catesby’s name was eclipsed by later ornithologists due to taxonomic fate. A mere six years after Catesby’s books were completed, Carolus Linneaus published his Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758), making earlier classification obsolete. Catesby’s woodpecker, "Picus maximus rostro alba," gave way to "Campephilus principalis". Ironically, Linneaus relied on Catesby’s descriptions of 71 birds in his taxonomic tables. Catesby lives and the bird remains silent. Or does it? (Legend by Ann Weissmann, Curator, MBL/WHOI Library, http://www.mblwhoilibrary.org/.)