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After realizing he had just seen an ivory-billed woodpecker thought to have vanished from the Earth 60 years ago, Westmoreland County ornithologist Mike Lanzone burst into tears.

"It really hit me," Lanzone said. "I was basically crying. It's so overwhelming knowing that you just saw something that is thought to be extinct. I'm a very lucky individual."

Lanzone, 30, who works for Powdermill Avian Research Center in Cook Township, a field station for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Oakland, was part of a secretive preservation project to confirm a sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas. Naturalists call the species the Holy Grail of birding.

Lanzone said the search included sitting in a canoe for six hours in pouring rain in 40-degree weather.

Lanzone, dressed in full camouflage, quietly moved through a channel of water March 10 in Arkansas' ancient cypress swamps and scanned the woods around him.

"I didn't think I was going to see anything that day," he said. "It really caught me off guard."

As he floated past a giant cypress tree, he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye.

"The bird flew off a stump after it saw me and flew from left to right through the woods in front of me," Lanzone said. "I got a good look at it for three to four seconds. I knew it was an ivory-billed woodpecker.

"I've observed birds for 20 years. Everything about it -- the way it flew, the size of it, where the white was on the wings -- I knew it was it."

While most specialists, including Lanzone, had thought the species was extinct, scientists announced Thursday that during the past 14 months veteran naturalists had spotted the largest American woodpecker seven times in the Big Woods of Arkansas, a 550,000-acre corridor of hardwood and swamp forest.

They also caught the bird briefly on a blurry video. Scientists hope as many as 30 of the birds might be living in the area.

The project was so secretive Lanzone and others working on it had to sign a confidentiality agreement.

"I was very skeptical at first. I tend to be skeptical about sightings in general," Lanzone said. "I wasn't a believer at all."

Scientists kept the project under wraps for so long to ensure the woodpecker's existence and to expand its habitat by purchasing more land around the refuge for conservation, said Scott Weidensaul, 46, who traveled with the expedition.

Weidensaul, a nature writer from Schuylkill County, did not see an ivory-billed woodpecker, but said it's one of the most important aviary discoveries of modern times.

"This is literally the Holy Grail of birding," Weidensaul said. "The ivory-bill has been a symbol of last chances. We've had so many chances to save it, we don't deserve another one. It became a lost icon of the obliteration of the bottomland forests throughout the Southeastern U.S."

The red-headed bird with snow-white patches on its back and tail feathers once was prominent throughout the South before logging and development destroyed most of its old hardwood habitat. Collectors sought mounted trophies of the bird, which typically is about 20 inches long and weighs 1 pound.

Conservationists worry the discovery will tempt bird lovers to flock to the Big Woods, said Brian Shema, director of sanctuaries for the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.

"My biggest fear is that birders will travel to Arkansas and put undue stress on that ecosystem," Shema said. "Knowing that the bird is there should be enough."

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