Skepticism from the inside

Below is another key section from the Arkansas Times article that I mentioned in a recent post. My comments are interspersed in red.
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Early in 2005, Team Elvis was edgy. There had been no reportable sightings between June 2004 and February 2005, though sounds like the characteristic BAM-bam double knock were heard.

Lammertink, who was growing increasingly skeptical, he confessed, was particularly uneasy.

I think the above sentence is extremely important. If you're thinking that skepticism is just "sour grapes" from those mean old outsiders, you need to explain why this highly-placed insider was also skeptical very late in the game. If Lammertink was "increasingly skeptical" in early 2005, that means that he was not convinced by the flurry of "robust" sightings reported in early 2004, he was not convinced by the double-knocks, and he was not initially convinced by the Luneau video.

It's been endlessly reported that the team "kept their secret" for 14 months while crucial land was purchased. I think there's another reason why the team didn't go public earlier--I think they were hoping to have the definitive photo in hand before making any announcement.

He and the team were about to report to Science magazine that a bird had come back from the dead, but they had no photographs.

But they did have video, shot with a Canon GL-2 by computer whiz David Luneau, a University of Arkansas professor and a veteran of the 2002 Pearl River search, on April 25, 2004, as he and his brother-in-law cruised the Bayou DeView checking recording devices. For 4 seconds, a blurry bird flew from a tupelo gum away from the canoe. The Cornell lab downloaded the video to software that extracted and de-interlaced frames to reveal the detail, and then magnified it.

Viewers gasped at what they saw. A mere six pixels of perched bird now revealed alternating bands of black, white, and black on its back.

In my opinion, this particular issue may ultimately prove to be very embarrassing to Cornell. It's shocking to me that ornithologists could seriously interpret six pixels as a perched Ivory-bill. I've written about this subject here.

If those six pixels are a perched Ivory-bill, I think there are maybe 5-10 other perched Ivory-bills on various trees in the Luneau video. One similar "Ivory-bill" is visible on another tree even as the Luneau bird is flying away.

On takeoff, the bird flaps wings black on the leading edge, white on the trailing edge — the reverse of the pileated pattern.

Still, Lammertink wanted to go further. Over beers with a crew from National Public Radio in March 2005, he decided to re-enact the Luneau video. Bobby Harrison carved full-sized models of pileated and ivory-billed woodpeckers and the team placed them on the same tupelo shot in Luneau’s video. The[y] filmed them again, at the same distance. Lammertink ran through the swamp pulling strings to flap the wings of the wooden woodpeckers. The team did 33 takes and then compared it to Luneau’s video.

I've spent some time looking at some of the fuzzy re-enactment video (filmed March 15, 2005) mentioned above. It's available on the Luneau DVD.

In my opinion, a major flaw in the re-enactment attempt involves the board-like wings on the wooden models that were used. The model Pileated has stiff, board-like wings, and at the given camera angle, it shows the mostly-dark upperwings when the wings are raised. A real Pileated has very flexible wings, and shows a lot of white from the underwings when the wings are raised. (I've previously written on this subject here).

Now, the team was reassured. The bird Luneau filmed was no pileated. Their paper announcing the find was completed and sent to Science April 6.

As I've written before, I think the bird is most likely an ordinary Pileated. My analysis is here.
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I'm trying to get a handle on what was really going on here. It seems that for a long time in 2004, team members thought that the definitive picture had to be just around the corner. But it never came.

If Lammertink was skeptical in early 2005, surely some other team members must have been skeptical too. The paper says that on "2–4 March 2005 we conducted a 'saturation search' with 23 observers spaced across the 4 [square kilometers] of forest in which all the sightings had occurred." When that failed, and with the end of the second intense field season looming around May 1, it must have become clearer that no better evidence might be forthcoming. What to do now?

Maybe the Luneau video would just have to suffice, so they worked hard to convince themselves that it showed an Ivory-bill. As I wrote earlier, they did some re-enactments of the video on March 15, and then submitted their paper on April 6.