A couple of analogies

When assessing the strength of the current evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker survives, I think the following analogies may be helpful:

1. Imagine going to your local records committee and saying you saw a Yellow-headed Blackbird. You only saw it in flight for 2 seconds and you didn’t see the yellow head, but it definitely had white in the wings and you’re 98.5% sure that’s what it was, so they should add it to the state list. No records committee would accept that record, but Cornell calls it a “robust sighting”. Maybe it was there, but there is a chance that it wasn’t.

2. On a dark night, your neighbor records the sound of hoofbeats on the asphalt road in front of his house in New Jersey. You could analyze the sounds and say "These sounds are strikingly similar to the hoofbeats of a zebra, and they are not an exact match to any known recordings of horse hoofbeats". Do you now have some convincing evidence that there was a zebra in the neighborhood?