TNC: odds are 1 in 1.2 million

This article appeared in the Miami Herald recently.

Here are a couple of snippets:

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The Nature Conservancy, long active in wetlands preservation in the Delta and a leader of the woodpecker search, has said 20,000 hours of tracking went into about 60 seconds of ivory-billed sightings during a year. The group figures the odds of seeing the bird are 1 in 1.2 million.
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Evidently, The Nature Conservancy calculated that a 1-second glimpse could be expected, on average, every 1.2 million seconds of search time. If you want a 3-second glimpse, you'll need to search for about 1000 hours (25 weeks at 40 search-hours per week). And remember, your glimpse may be a distant look at a bird that isn't an Ivory-bill.

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Ivory-billed woodpeckers are fast, strong fliers that may cover 20 square miles of territory a day.
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I think the above figure is misleading at best, and it may be part of the 79.48% of all statistics that are made up on the spot.

Of course, no Ivory-bills were ever studied with telemetry (and I think only one was ever banded). I very much doubt that anyone has any data showing that an individual Ivory-bill ever visited 20 different square-mile sections within a single day.