Tim Spahr, an Ivory-billed searcher and Harvard astrophysicist who specializes in asteroid movements and calculation of rare events, created an algorithm based both on James Tanner's description of the species in the Singer Tract and on the habitat in Bayou de View. By his calculations, a single Ivory-billed occupying that area could manage to avoid detection by 20 observers indefinitely!To review: when the bird was last known, it was large, it flew noisily, its call sometimes carried a quarter mile, it spent time hanging on dead trees in full daylight, it repeatedly used the same roost hole, and it wasn't noticeably more wary than a Pileated. Now we're told that the same species could occupy a few square miles and avoid 20 modern observers indefinitely?! I can't help suspecting that there may be some serious flaws in that algorithm....
The authors of the article are Ken Rosenberg, Ron Rohrbaugh, and Martjan Lammertink from the Cornell search team. Their mention of this algorithm provides an interesting window into the thinking of the search team.
11/10/05 update:
Tim Spahr emailed me to say that his algorithm postulated a theoretical bird with an 800-square-mile home range, rather than a real-life bird with a home range of a few square miles. The algorithm also ignores all information from any other sources: hunters, remote cameras, ARUs, etc.
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