What was your best experience in the field covering this story?

The most rewarding part of this assignment was the opportunity —"excuse" might be a more honest word—to spend significant time in the area of eastern Arkansas that's called the Big Woods. I'd explored and written about the area before, but for this story I drove, walked, and paddled through parts of the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges that I'd never seen.

On several occasions I spent entire days in the bottomland forest, sitting by myself as quietly as possible from dawn to dusk. In some ways these were the best days of all: listening to the way bird song changes as the sun moves across the sky; watching turtles, snakes, deer, raccoons, and other animals go about their business unmindful of being observed; and generally trying to feel part of a world in which I truly could be only a short-term visitor.

What was your worst experience in the field covering this story?

My least favorite part of the research was sitting and listening to people on both sides of the Believer/Skeptic divide say nasty ad hominem things about those they had come to consider as their opponents. In many cases, I heard claims and accusations that I knew for a fact to be untrue and that were unworthy of a scientific debate. I don't mean to imply that people were intentionally lying; they had simply taken positions and (to continue the religious metaphor) dismissed any contradictory evidence or theories as heresy.

What was your quirkiest experience in the field covering this story?

I'm making no judgment about any factual scientific aspect of the ivorybill phenomenon when I say that the subject attracts an odd group of people. I've never been to a convention of Bigfoot searchers or UFO enthusiasts, but I'd be willing to bet that there's some overlap with ivorybill hunters and, especially, bloggers. People who followed the ivorybill story only in the mainstream media had no idea of the polarization that quickly took place in the blogosphere and elsewhere on the Internet. Certain sites became the bulletin boards of Believers or Skeptics, where no theory was too absurd to find adherents, no innuendo too slanderous to remain unvoiced, and the whole situation seemed, alternately, a church revival, a political rally, and a soap opera.