Bigfoot/Ivory-bill parallels

If you're interested in the Ivory-bill controversy, you really should read this entire article. It's titled "Bigfoot at 50: Evaluating a Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence".

I was going to highlight specific parallels between the Bigfoot and Ivory-bill stories, but there are so many that I'm not going to bother. Here's a single snippet:
----
...On the other hand, if Bigfoot is instead a self-perpetuating phenomenon with no genuine creature at its core, the stories, sightings, and legends will likely continue unabated for centuries. In this case the believers will have all the evidence they need to keep searching-some of it provided by hoaxers, others perhaps by honest mistakes, all liberally basted with wishful thinking. Either way it's a fascinating topic. If Bigfoot exist, then the mystery will be solved; if they don't exist, the mystery will endure. So far it has endured for at least half a century.
----

Tim Barksdale says "$35 million" raised

According to this article (free registration required), Tim Barksdale spoke at Pittsburg State University last night.

Here's a snippet:
-----
"We've raised $35 million so far to build habitat," Barksdale said.

He also believes that there are probably ivory-bills in other locations as well. "These birds have a 33-inch wing span, and they are powerful flyers," he said. "In Big Oak Tree State Park in Missouri I observed that bark on several trees was scaled, just the way ivory-bills do in their search for the beetle grubs that live under the bark. If ivory-bills didn't do it, I don't know what did."

He added that the devastation caused by recent hurricanes, as bad as it has been for humans, may actually benefit the woodpeckers.
-----
Regarding the bark scaling in Missouri--here's one possibility. Another is mentioned by Jerome Jackson on page 246 of "In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker":
---
Extensive scaling can also be caused by hunters who use a type of deer stand that clamps around a tree and is pushed higher and higher as the hunter climbs. Each time the hunter puts his or her weight on the stand, it bites into the bark, holding the hunter at that level. Each of those bites loosens bark, often causing it to fall away from the tree.
---

Noel Snyder on potential Ivory-bill misidentification

In 1979, Noel Snyder saw an aberrant Pileated in Florida that looked a lot like an Ivory-bill. Here's a snippet from page 30 of Snyder's book "The Carolina Parakeet, Glimpses of a Vanished Bird":
=====
Surely, mistakes in identification are sometimes made even by highly competent observers. Two examples from my own experience illustrate the risks clearly. One was a sighting of my own of an apparent Ivory-billed Woodpecker in central Florida in 1979. This was a bird that I flushed from a log in working through a hammock east of the Archbold Biological Station. The bird flew up to the vertical trunk of a pine only a few yards distant, and I could plainly see that it was a very large woodpecker with distinct large white secondary triangles on its folded wings, the most diagnostic field mark of the ivory-bill in distinguishing it from the somewhat similar Pileated Woodpecker.

Had the bird flown on immediately after I detected it, I would have been forever sure that I had seen a living Ivory-bill. But the bird remained perched on the pine trunk, giving me time to examine it more closely with binoculars. I soon determined that the white triangles on the bird's wings were in fact cream in color, not pure white, and in fact there were two black feathers intermixed with the cream-colored secondaries on the bird's left wing. Further, the bird lacked the huge white bill of an ivory-bill and instead had the much smaller black bill typical of a Pileated Woodpecker. I was almost surely looking at an aberrant Pileated with odd secondary feathers, not an ivory-bill, although optimists might suggest that it could have been a hybrid of the two species.
=======
I've been told that Pileated and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are/were too distantly related to interbreed (they are in different genera).

On the back flap of the above book, it says that Noel Snyder is the author of four books on natural history subjects, and that he is a recipient of several national conservation awards.

Other hard evidence completely absent

I asked an ornithologist about testing an item like a feather, an eggshell, or a dropping. He tells me that DNA testing could most likely be done that would conclusively prove whether the item came from an Ivory-bill.

9/23/05 update: Here's a lab specifically advertising this type of testing for $23 with a turnaround time of five business days.

I think it's significant that Cornell has failed to gather any of this kind of evidence. After 20,000 hours in the field, it seems likely to me that you'd find something if the birds were there (especially if you spent a lot of time around likely feeding and roosting areas).

This is just one more issue in a long list of troubling issues from Arkansas (ie, the bird seems impossibly wary, it's incredibly non-vocal, it seems to fly without the characteristic loud wing noise, it has chosen poor-to-marginal habitat, it seems to look a lot like a normal or abnormal Pileated, it double-raps oddly and rarely, etc).

Intriguing bark scaling--from Pileateds

In recent weeks, some people have argued that "bark scaling" in Arkansas was evidence of Ivory-bills. I don't think that argument holds much water.

There's an interesting snippet here:
----
Team Elvis has detected intriguing bark scaling in the White River refuge. But they’ve also seen, thanks to a motion-triggered camera aimed at a scaled tree, bug-hunting pileateds creating much the same damage. From a 6-by-6-foot platform along the bayou north of the Highway 17 bridge, Mel White, one of Arkansas’s premier birders and a volunteer searcher, watched a pileated “on a horizontal branch of a tupelo peel off strips of bark about 9 inches long.”
----
Here are some "remote camera" pictures of Pileateds at sites with intriguing bark scaling.

Ivory-bill hoax in South Carolina, 1971?

Many people believe that there was an elaborate Ivory-bill hoax in South Carolina in 1971. Here's a snippet from an article with some details:
----
Consider the story of Alex Sanders, a political science teacher in South Carolina.
In 1971, he used a "recording" of the ivory-billed woodpecker's "call" to stop the clear-cutting of 10,000 acres of the Santee Swamp, a beautiful natural area near Charleston.

He was a young state legislator back then, and somehow -- he says -- obtained an audio recording of the presumably extinct bird.
He took that recording, along with a local TV reporter and an executive of the Audubon Society, on a boat into the swamp, where he played the recording through speakers.
Then, according to those on board, the ivory-billed woodpecker -- unseen -- "answered" from somewhere deep in the swamp.

That's all it took for the Audubon Society and politicians to swing into action, and soon logging and clear-cutting were banned in the Santee swamp, and the pristine natural area was saved.

The bird was never seen, and many still believe it was an elaborate hoax contrived to halt the clearing of the swamp.
----

As I searched the Internet for more information on this 1971 story, I found this:
----
Regarding the 1971 South Carolina adventure, put me in the "It was a damn hoax" camp. As one of the suckered ones who stomped around interviewing locals, I can tell you that they were well coached. I'll never forget the little old lady whose last name was also the name of the street she lived on. Every inch of wall space in her home was covered with pictures of birds that had been cut out of magazines & put into dime store frames. I'm talking about HUNDREDS of these things!! She told us about seeing IBWOs flying over cotton fields & other wild places. She was a total hoot.

The best example of total BS was the hunting guide who claimed to have seen a pair at the nest with young. Knowing how many people would pay a great deal of mony to see an IBWO I offered him $100,000.00 to lead me to the nest. He said that he couldn't take me that weekend because he had to go to a wedding, & the next week end was a neighourhood cook-out or some such crap. He never did get back to me.

Well, the Santee Swamp was saved, so in this case the ends did justify the means.
----

Of course, there have been plenty of suspected Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster hoaxes over the years.

I don't suspect a hoax relating to any of the current evidence from Arkansas. I think that Cornell has made only honest mistakes in interpreting the evidence. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if someone else tries to manufacture more Ivory-bill evidence sooner or later.

Skeptical discussion starting last April

There's some good discussion in this thread, which appeared immediately after the Ivory-bill news broke in late April of this year. Some of these posters were immediately skeptical for good reasons.

The first poster wrote: "...I’ve got a bad feeling that hopes are going to be dashed again. ...with this much psychic energy pushing for the existence of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, it pays to be extra-careful."

Thoughts after the AOU meeting

According to my information, some Ivory-bill skeptics decided in advance that last month's AOU meeting was not the right time or place for a public challenge of Cornell's evidence.

After attending the meeting, an ornithologist emailed me the following:
----
I suspect that one's take on the general mood following Fitz's plenary address at the recent AOU meeting depended on the crowd with which you associated. Yes, there were many in the audience that were pleased, even giddy. But the skeptics were legion and I doubt that any were swayed. With the exception of a single waffler, everyone with whom I spoke after the talk either doubted strongly or was an agnostic who only happened to enjoy Fitz's show (he is a captivating speaker).

Fitz didn't present any new information. He did, however, have four or five slides that attempted to address concerns that have been raised over the past 3+ months. Perhaps his doing so assuaged minor doubts in some people. But in my view his talk had the opposite effect: to see the entirety of the evidence laid out before me was to walk away wondering how CLO got so far with so little.
----

Are tantalizing glimpses significant?

Cyberthrush suggests that if David Sibley reported a low-quality glimpse of an "Ivory-bill", the skeptics would readily accept that the Ivory-bill lives. I completely disagree.

It's been reported publicly that Sibley did, in fact, have "tantalizing glimpses" when he visited the area. I don't think any of the skeptics, Sibley included, places much value on those glimpses. There are many cases of highly-respected birders reporting low-quality sightings to bird records committees, only to have their sightings rejected. That is as it should be.

Even a very large number of brief, low-quality "Ivory-bill" glimpses would mean very little to me.