Disappearing owls, threatened forests, and the city-country conflict "Ghost" is a word field biologists use to describe a species near the end of the time on earth. It's a spooky concept, but well-established -- the journal Science uses the word, for example, to describe the now-famous Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. These sort of ghosts can jolt authorities into drastic action. In the Southeast, for example, the federal government says it is prepared to spend $27 million on a plan to bring back the large, charismatic woodpecker long thought to be extinct. As of 2005, one male was known to exist, although the bird has not been captured clearly on film in decades. Today in the Pacific Northwest, history is threatening to repeat this old story in a new way. Millions of acres of national forest were set aside as protected habitat to save the Spotted Owl under the Clinton administration, but, in a bitter irony, as the bird becomes increasingly rare, it becomes easier to argue that much of this forest is no longer owl habitat and shouldn't be protected....