Tim Gallagher speaks

Here is a new article with some quotes by Tim Gallagher.

1. Here's one snippet from the above article:
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In May 1971, however, a mysterious man contacted George Lowery of Louisiana State University about photographs that he had taken in the Atchafalaya Swamp of Southern Louisiana that supposedly depicted the extinct woodpecker. Lowery went to the site and saw excavation marks that might have belonged to an ivory-bill.
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I think it's interesting to contrast Gallagher's take on this incident with Jerome Jackson's writing on the same incident. On page 171 of Jackson's book "In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" (published in 2004), Jackson writes:
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Lowery made several trips to the area, but was never able to find the birds or feeding signs that would suggest their presence. On his first trip to the site, he located a fresh excavation in a baldcypress within about a hundred yards of where the photos were taken, but thought perhaps the cavity was made by a pileated woodpecker. Tanner also saw the cavity and was convinced that it had been made by a pileated woodpecker.
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2. Here's a second snippet from the above article:
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Gallagher mentioned that his “15 minutes of fame came last April” when he was invited to a press conference at the Department of the Interior. “It was pretty funny ... a couple senators, governors, the secretaries of the interior and agriculture both spoke … the Washington press corps was there. You think of them as cynical but they were so excited.” Gallagher then recounted how a reporter from Reuters asked, “Can’t we hear from someone who has seen the bird?” Gallagher went up to the podium and, as he described, “you could say anything and they’d be writing it down.”
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In hindsight, I think that they should have been more cynical. As someone emailed to me "The hope-to-evidence ratio is way too high in this case."