The one troubling issue about the Ivory-bill--another viewpoint

Yesterday, a "concerned citizen" passed these interesting thoughts on to me:

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“It's weird how we've become a society where people choose teams, and every issue is black-and-white, with debates becoming so polarized rather than being exercises to tease out the real truth wherever it lies in the continuum between two sides. I found Jerome Jackson to be very reasonable and open-minded, and quite able to deal with nuance…” - Laura Erickson

I was very pleased to read “The one troubling issue about the Ivory-bill” on Laura's blog. I was encouraged by her apparent sympathy to Jerry Jackson’s nuanced skeptical viewpoint, and her seemingly sincere desire to get beyond the polarized debate “to tease out the real truth”.

How can she follow that post with a full endorsement of Jeff Bouton’s anti-scientist diatribe? So much for nuance. Rah-rah for the believers team.

Jeff and Laura are inciting anti-scientist feelings without any evidence. It’s the one thing that really bugged me in Tim Gallagher’s book, because it lays the groundwork for the attacks on anyone who questions the current sightings – “Oh you’re just like all those other close-minded scientists who didn’t believe”. And it’s simply NOT TRUE. There’s Jerry Jackson, who has looked harder than anyone, and would have been happy to send Jeff and any other volunteer out into a swamp somewhere. One of George Lowery’s former grad students said he did his masters thesis on some mundane survey of the Atchafalaya because it allowed him to spend three years scouring the swamp in hopes of running into the woodpeckers (Lowery wouldn’t tell him where the 1971 photos came from). Gallagher suggests that Dennis’s report in Texas was ignored and ridiculed, but in “The Bird Life of Texas” it says “scores of naturalists came from all over the United States…many camped for days, weeks, or months…. At the end of years of effort, there were still no unquestionable photographs” And countless other examples of follow-up searches and interest in the species in Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, etc.

The claim that reports were ignored is untrue. It’s revisionist, and it suits the believers’ purpose - it allows them to say that the bird went undetected because nobody looked hard enough.

Jeff claims that there is a shadowy group of evil scientists who want to declare the Ivory-billed extinct and destroy the reputation of anyone who suggests looking for them. He’s not alone in suggesting that such a group exists, Tim Gallagher and others believe it’s out there.

Is Jerry Jackson one of the scientists who have been so “adamant” over the years that the bird is extinct? Are Laura and Jeff accusing him (along with Sibley, Prum, Robbins, and Kaufman) of the “loud public ridicule” that has destroyed careers, of turning unconfirmed reports into a “laughing matter”? Are they the icons who “brainwashed” everyone that the bird couldn’t possibly exist? Are they part of the “vicious community” that “snuffed rumors” and “attacked” people who reported Ivory-billeds? Have any of the current skeptics called anyone “liars”, or “crazy”, or declared the species extinct?

I think “the one troubling issue about the Ivory-bill” is that so many people simply attack the questioners, instead of listening to the questions.

What we need, as Kenn Kaufman said in the New York Times is an open debate. This is anything but that.
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