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 BIG THICKET NATIONAL PRESERVE, Texas (AP) - Corinne Campbell stuffs her gear in waterproof sacks and stuffs them and herself into a tiny circular cutout that marks the seat in her green kayak. With a clear signal from the GPS unit clipped near her orange vest, she shoves off between large downed tree trunks. Then she propels her tiny needle-nose craft into a wide rain-swollen creek that wiggles through what's been called the biological crossroads of North America. And so begins another daylong search for a giant bird that may not exist.
Campbell and a pair of companions in similar kayaks have been on a tedious winter-long canvass of Texas' famed Big Thicket, an often impenetrable jungle of swamps choked with thorny vines and prodigious pine and cedar trees, in pursuit of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
The bird, at 20 inches with a nearly three-foot wingspan, is the third-largest woodpecker in the world and the biggest woodpecker north of Mexico.
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