N ature entranced me when I was a kid. I was an avid bird watcher, in the literal sense. I’d spend hours in the woods, sitting as still as I could, waiting and trying not to stir, to see how close I could get to the shy thrushes.

Oh, I also loved the gregarious ones that crowded our feeder, the finches and chickadees and titmice. Some were bold enough to eat from my hand. But, as any bird-lover will tell you, the true moments of grace come when something rare and elusive crosses your path. So the first time I saw a Pileated woodpecker, it was like some direct kind of blessing, the huge, black-and-white creature with its improbable red crest gliding between the trees in the deep woods far from the house. I knew it was an endangered species. I gave thanks and ran home to tell my family.

They didn’t believe me. It was so rare; they didn’t know anyone who had seen one. I was just a kid. What did I know?

But I did know. I’d studied my guides. There was no mistaking this creature, the biggest woodpecker by far, more than a foot tall with a two-and-a-half-foot wingspan. Nothing could come close to it in appearance except the Ivory Bill of the southern woodlands and that, I knew, along with the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Paroquet, was extinct.

If you live in the country, surrounded by trees, you might know this blessing. No longer endangered, the big guys are there, and if you’re out in the woods and not making too much noise, you might have spotted one, swooping between the branches or knocking its huge beak into a rotten trunk, probing for grubs.

I’ve known a few of these birds in the intervening years, and they are maddening because, as you get to know their distinctive, rising and falling kuk-kuk-kuk, you often know there’s one around, but you can’t see him. I’ve come to the conclusion that they love to taunt humans, calling out and then guilefully staying on the far side of the tree trunks, just out of sight, until they make a quick, swooping appearance and — if you’re lucky — alight for a few seconds in full view.

One hangs out near the barn where my horses live; I’ve seen him a few times in recent months, but I hear him much more often. Does he know how beautiful he is, and how I yearn for just a few more seconds to drink in the sight of him? Just a glimpse can change my whole morning.

And then last week came the news that this bird’s only rival, long assumed to be extinct, had shown itself fully alive in the Arkansas wilderness last year. An Ivory Bill.

Forget the war, forget Congress, forget for a moment all the awful news that fills our days. People, this is huge. This gorgeous creature has somehow survived — at least one of them inhabits those deep southern woods, seen by three people, all of whom know their birds.

At first, according to Gene Sparling, he thought he was looking at a Pileated. But then the great bird flew, and its dramatic, distinctive pattern, like a giant black-and-white chevron, gave it away, along with its utterly different flight pattern. And its bill, unlike the Pileated’s, was white.

Sparling posted his experience on a Web site and was soon joined in the woods by Tim Gallagher, who had written a book about the Ivory Bill called “The Grail Bird.” Along with Alabaman Bobby Harrison, the two went back to look for the woodpecker and, when he flew in front of their canoe, Sparling burst into sobs.

I’m not surprised. What a gift.

Humans have walked on the moon and have crossed the poles, but the moon and the poles will always be with us. These men saw something we thought was lost forever, just a few pounds of live birdflesh but infinitely, magically precious.

That is news, rarer than man bites dog. That’s heavenly reprieve.

And that is also victory of some sort, since the great birds disappeared as their habitat was logged into oblivion. Or almost. Where this one lives is a National Wildlife Refuge, which means that it owes its existence to the prescience of the humans who set aside this piece of forest and kept it pristine, hoping only to save some homeplace for wild things but never dreaming that, deep in its hidden places, a few Ivory Bills, unseen for 60 years, lived on.

It would be so good to think that one day the Ivory Bill might be like the Pileated of my youth, simply rare, so that some child could tell skeptical grownups about it, and a generation later it might become simply a morning blessing for that child’s children.

We all need to pray hard that, somewhere among those dark branches, there’s another Ivory Bill, and that she likes this guy a lot.