Ever go pricing a woodpecker? Unlike chicken or duck, you can't buy the meat of one by the pound at your local supermarket or even at a trendy food emporium. As their feathers are not used for down like goose, you'd be forced to purchase one alive. But where?

     Not at any pet store. Woodpeckers might have a certain esthetic appeal, but who'd want a noisy bird that'd spend the rest of its life trying to peck its way out of a cage?

     One might conclude that a woodpecker is worthless. Not as a member or the ecological scheme of things, of course; the birds perform their own natural function—insect control. And granted, the world would be a poorer place if all the woodpeckers suddenly vanished, but as I cannot go out and buy a woodpecker anywhere at price, then one is forced to conclude, as no one is selling any, that as a commodity, a woodpecker is worthless.  

       Unless it's an ivory billed woodpecker, believed to be extinct since 1944. Unconfirmed sightings and a blurry videotape have set birdwatchers and scientists  aflurry in a mad quest to find living proof of the bird's return.

       The discovery "is huge, just huge," said Frank Gill, senior ornithologist at the New York City-based National Audubon Society. "It is kind of like finding Elvis."

       "Through the 20th century it's been every birder's fantasy to catch a glimpse of this bird, however remote the possibility," added John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. "This really is the holy grail."

         But the ivory billed woodpecker remains elusive and speculation abounds that a living specimen may not exist after all.

        Just imagine if you had one, perched contently on your living room sofa. Its droppings would be a minor inconvenience and the holes it drills into your pine dresser would add a unique trademark to an otherwise ordinary piece of furniture.

        Post a picture of your living ivory bill on E-bay with an opening bid of $1 million and the world will beat a path to your monitor. What was once considered worthless is forever priceless!

        Something to consider as you peck away at your keyboard, telling that short story of yours. Short stories are not unlike woodpeckers: they're everywhere and each is trying to peck its own unique hole in the fabric of the universe.

        Do not allow yours to be yet another common pecking entity in the seeming vacuum of cyberspace, doomed to be forgotten or ignored in the cosmic scheme of things. Yours shall be the holy grail of writing, the ivory bill of short stories, unique in all the universe and eternally pecking its way into the hearts and minds and souls of humanity.

        Make those words take wing!

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