Is better camo the answer?

In the last couple of search seasons, the Cornell team has been going to some pretty extreme lengths camouflage-wise. This seems excessive to see a bird that Tanner said was "certainly not noticeably more wary and wild than the Pileated Woodpecker".

In "The Grail Bird", page 220, Tim Gallagher writes this about Bobby Harrison:

He dressed in camo clothes. He draped shredded camouflage material over himself and his canoe. And then he smeared gobs of multicolored camouflage greasepaint all over his face. He looked truly scary, like some whacked-out survivalist hiding deep in a bayou.

There's a picture of a camouflaged Harrison here.

I think extreme camo has its uses, maybe when you're trying to get those fantastic closeup shots of sharp-eyed birds like hawks. But should you have to use it just to see a woodpecker? And if you do use heroic measures for tens of thousands of search-hours with no luck, maybe your quarry just isn't out there.

Using the extreme camo above, here is the type of "evidence" that we've gathered.

Back in the 1930s, I'm confident that Tanner never used a ghillie suit or face paint. Yet here and here is the type of evidence that small search teams were able to gather repeatedly.

If Ivory-bills live today, it's reasonable to believe that the population would be at least as high as the couple dozen or so living in the 1930s. We've got no reason to believe that they would be any more silent or wary than they were in the '30s, and the odds seem vanishingly low that they could continually escape confirmed detection given our massive modern search efforts, our ghillie suits, our ARUs, our remote cameras, etc etc.

As I look at pictures of Cornell volunteers trying on ghillie suits, I can't help thinking that this whole thing may be the world's largest and best-funded "snipe hunt".