-- Close Encounters of the Bird Kind? --

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I've never cared much for science fiction (have never seen a Star Trek or Star Wars movie, and you couldn't pay me to sit through one), but one offering I did fancy was "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." If you saw it you know part of the plot involves disparate people from around the country eerily drawn together by the coming arrival of extraterrestrials on Earth. Sometimes I think about the 'feel' of that movie as we await now, as it were, for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to land!
One of the grand things about this whole Ivory-bill adventure is that in an oddly similar way it too has drawn together dozens and dozens of people (many having believed in this bird since childhood), who otherwise might never have known each other, or shared anything in common, yet are now inextricably connected by the draw of this iconic species. People with academic credentials and/or titles, or unsung names, or internet handles, all intertwined like the seekers at Devil's Tower in the award-winning movie. And the full cast of characters in this ongoing saga is even more outlandish than that cast of "Close Encounters..." Who would've scripted a "Bill Smith" or a "Tom Nelson" or even a Gene Sparling, or a... well, nevermind. And who knew a movie could be this long and hold an audience... Indeed, like any good movie, many of us anxiously await the ending... which in this case will be the only way of determining whether the plot itself was science-fiction, or science-fact. ...Oh, and did I mention, I don't usually sit through science-fiction.
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