So: I feel strongly that no ivorybill was present at the above time and location, but I could be wrong.

Get used to that kind of sentence, because today's lesson is all about conjunctions and adverbs: but, though, however, unless, possibly, nonetheless, and, of course, maybe. Especially maybe.

Two months later and 40 miles (65 kilometers) to the north, Ron Rohrbaugh of the CLO stood on the lawn under the clock tower of the Monroe County courthouse, addressing a small crowd sheltered from the midday sun under tents provided by a local funeral home. He was there to announce the results of a six-month search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in the area of eastern Arkansas known as the Big Woods, a half-million-acre (200,000 hectares) expanse of forest and wetlands centered on the White River. The effort involved some 20 field biologists and more than a hundred carefully selected volunteers, as well as remote audio recorders, automatic cameras, GPS-based computer mapping, and all the other high-tech gizmos that the team had assembled with its million-dollar budget.

Rohrbaugh thanked the people of eastern Arkansas for their hospitality, reviewed past research, and listed some "interesting" and "intriguing" possible sightings that unfortunately "don't add any additional confirmation." All this might have been summed up in a pithy phrase his colleague Elliott Swarthout had used a few days earlier. "We're going to present exactly what we found this season," Swarthout said, "and that ain't squat."

It was a long way, literally and figuratively, from the scene a year earlier when, on April 28, 2005, CLO director John Fitzpatrick stood on a stage in Washington, D.C., along with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture Departments and two senators, to announce that a secret Cornell-led search team had confirmed the existence of an ivory-billed woodpecker flitting elusively through the tupelos along a small Arkansas stream called Bayou DeView.