Groupthink?

To me, given the weak evidence, it's mind-boggling that Cornell could publicly claim conclusive proof that the Ivory-bill had been re-discovered. I don't see just a niggling concern here or there among the evidence--I see red flags, and lots of them. How could this happen?!

If Cornell is wrong, groupthink may partly explain this situation.

Here's a snippet from the groupthink link above:
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Janis cited a number of antecedent conditions that would be likely to encourage groupthink. These include:

• Insulation of the group
• High group cohesiveness
• Directive leadership
• Lack of norms requiring methodical procedures
• Homogeneity of members' social background and ideology
• High stress from external threats with low hope of a better solution than the one offered by the leader(s)

Janis listed eight symptoms that he said were indicative of groupthink:

1. Illusion of invulnerability
2. Unquestioned belief in the inherent morality of the group
3. Collective rationalization of group's decisions
4. Shared stereotypes of outgroup, particularly opponents
5. Self-censorship; members withhold criticisms
6. Illusion of unanimity (see false consensus effect)
7. Direct pressure on dissenters to conform
8. Self-appointed "mindguards" protect the group from negative information

Finally, the seven symptoms of decision affected by groupthink are:

1. Incomplete survey of alternatives
2. Incomplete survey of objectives
3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
4. Failure to re-appraise initially rejected alternatives
5. Poor information search
6. Selective bias in processing information at hand (see also confirmation bias)
7. Failure to work out contingency plans
   

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I think a number of the points above may apply to the Cornell search team.

Parallels with 2002 Pearl River search

A cynic may experience some deja vu in browsing this web page about the failed 2002 Pearl River (Louisiana) Ivory-bill search (many familiar names are on this page). There seems to be a recurring pattern--search very hard, find only flimsy evidence, then recommend more searching.

There's a photo of the forest with the caption "If the Ivorybill is in here, our searchers will find it".

The searchers did not find the Ivory-bill. However, "intriguing evidence" such as bark scaling and apparent double-knocks was collected, and searchers seemed actually encouraged by this outcome. Check out the links at "Personal opinions of the searchers" for more.

The February 20, 2002 search report contains this:
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In view of the good habitat quality and secondary but promising indications found, we recommend more searches in this area.
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That same report also talked about the encouraging double-raps:
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The raps were unmistakably sounds of something vigorously striking wood...
Three reviewers wrote that the raps sounded like gunshots. We were in an area with much hunting activity and a shooting range and were familiar with the sound of gunshots. The four members that heard the sound in the field were immediately convinced that these were powerful raps on wood and were confident they were not gunshots. By triangulation and distance estimates we assessed the raps to have been at 150 to 340 m from the recordist, and it seems highly unlikely that gunshot at that range could have been misidentified. Independently of our team, the Cornell team heard a double rap the same day close to our site, and they also were certain their raps were not gunshots. We again heard double and single raps at this locality on January 29, and again there was no doubt about the 'wood' quality of the raps.

A few months later, this press release was issued.
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At one point during the exploration, two different research teams independently heard loud double raps that sounded suspiciously like the distinctive display drum of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Sadly, analysis of the ARU data proved that the sounds were distant gun shots, with reverberations that sounded to human ears like drumming on a hollow snag.
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When I see the words "unmistakably", "certain" and "no doubt" above, I'm reminded of this famous exchange from the movie "The Princess Bride":
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Fezzini: Inconceivable!
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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On page 177 of his book, "In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker", Jerome Jackson writes of those double-raps:
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I was contacted and asked for my opinion of the sounds. To me they were clearly not the rapping of an ivory-bill; there was no loud "BAM" followed immediately by a lesser "bam". To me they sounded like gunshots--clear, evenly spaced, and identically sounding: "bam bam bam bam". I responded with my opinion that they were gunshots and was told "You'll be sorry you said that."
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I wonder why Jackson wasn't invited to be a member of the Arkansas search team?

Smithsonian Magazine IBWO article

There's a Smithsonian magazine article on the ivory-bill here. Below are some snippets in black, along with my comments in red.
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Everyone realized that if word leaked out, birders would stampede to the forest, hoping to add the woodpecker to their life lists, and greatly complicate the mission.
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Actually, the word is now fully "out", and no such stampede has occurred.
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The clincher was a video made in April 2004 by David Luneau, a professor of electronics at the University of Arkansas and a member of the Big Woods search team. Luneau took me, moving silently in a canoe rigged with an electric trolling motor, to the spot where he and his brother-in-law got just three or four seconds of video as the ivory-bill flew away. Still, it was enough to clearly show the enormous patches of white on the rear half of the wings and bands of white on the back—proof that this was no mere pileated woodpecker.
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In my opinion, this video provides no such proof, clearly or unclearly.
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Even after I had spent days in the forest, canoeing with team members or sitting quietly alone on an observation platform, listening to the whooping of barred owls, I sometimes found it hard to believe the object of the hunt was real.
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Agreed.
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Ivory-billed woodpeckers can live up to 30 years...
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Can they? Cornell's own Birds of North America says there is "no data" on the IBWO's life span. The late Eirik Blom wrote that the Pileated life span record was about 12 years.
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The trees are still relatively young compared with the 1,000-year-old monsters that once grew there. But in this part of the world trees grow fast, and some of the second-growth is now a century old.
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Fast-growing trees were poor Ivory-bill habitat. Decrepit, dying old trees were far better.
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People claim to have seen the bird in half a dozen or more places around the South—the Apalachicola River, Wekiva River and the Fakahatchee/Big Cypress Swamp in Florida, the Congaree Swamp in South Carolina, the Pascagoula and Yazoo rivers in Mississippi, and the Pearl River in Louisiana.
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Unverifiable Ivory-bill sightings should not be the source of undue optimism. According to this article, The Texas Bigfoot Research Center investigates about 100 Bigfoot sightings in the state each year.
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Crying wolf?

Cyberthrush posted this particular thought, but I've heard the same basic idea too many times lately, both publicly and privately:
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If the [Ivory-bill] believers are wrong, the worst that will happen is that money, time, resources, energy, will have been directed toward preserving a certain wild area of the Southeast on a false premise -- and, uhhh, geee... that's a bad thing???
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In my opinion, yes, it is a "bad thing" to use a false premise to get what you want. In my view, this is not only a bad thing when other people do it; it's also a bad thing if we (birders and environmentalists) do it.

It appears that nonexistent Ivory-bills may have been used at least twice in the past for the purposes of preserving land.

1. From "The Grail Bird, page 21:
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...The one good thing to come from the [never-confirmed] sighting is that the possible presence of ivory-bills in the area helped spur the creation of the Big Thicket National Preserve. A bill passed by Congress in October 1974 set aside an 84,550 acre preserve--not bad for an extinct bird.
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2. It appears to have also worked in South Carolina in 1971.

In my opinion, "crying wolf", or "crying Ivory-bill" is a very poor long-term strategy. It evidently worked for the Big Thicket and South Carolina situations above, and it may be working again (temporarily) in Arkansas.

However, if definitive Ivory-bill proof doesn't emerge soon, I think an unpleasant backlash will follow. If this premise really is false, I'm afraid that future, legitimate conservation efforts may suffer.

To me, it seems sensible to wait for the definitive photographic proof. If it ever comes, I would then be in favor of launching into massive fundraising and Ivory-bill-specific habitat programs.

If you believe that an Ivory-bill is currently living in Arkansas, you also must believe that the Ivory-bill survived and successfully bred throughout the last six decades, and you also must believe that the Ivory-bill can live in what seems to be sub-optimal habitat. Does anyone really think that after 60+ years of its thriving despite our "neglect", we've finally glimpsed the Ivory-bill at the precise moment when it can no longer survive without our special help?

Tim Gallagher speaks

Here is a new article with some quotes by Tim Gallagher.

1. Here's one snippet from the above article:
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In May 1971, however, a mysterious man contacted George Lowery of Louisiana State University about photographs that he had taken in the Atchafalaya Swamp of Southern Louisiana that supposedly depicted the extinct woodpecker. Lowery went to the site and saw excavation marks that might have belonged to an ivory-bill.
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I think it's interesting to contrast Gallagher's take on this incident with Jerome Jackson's writing on the same incident. On page 171 of Jackson's book "In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" (published in 2004), Jackson writes:
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Lowery made several trips to the area, but was never able to find the birds or feeding signs that would suggest their presence. On his first trip to the site, he located a fresh excavation in a baldcypress within about a hundred yards of where the photos were taken, but thought perhaps the cavity was made by a pileated woodpecker. Tanner also saw the cavity and was convinced that it had been made by a pileated woodpecker.
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2. Here's a second snippet from the above article:
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Gallagher mentioned that his “15 minutes of fame came last April” when he was invited to a press conference at the Department of the Interior. “It was pretty funny ... a couple senators, governors, the secretaries of the interior and agriculture both spoke … the Washington press corps was there. You think of them as cynical but they were so excited.” Gallagher then recounted how a reporter from Reuters asked, “Can’t we hear from someone who has seen the bird?” Gallagher went up to the podium and, as he described, “you could say anything and they’d be writing it down.”
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In hindsight, I think that they should have been more cynical. As someone emailed to me "The hope-to-evidence ratio is way too high in this case."

Update to my Luneau video analysis

I've just added this update to my Luneau video analysis:

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There's yet another potential problem with Cornell's wrist-to-tailtip measurement. I think the exact location of the tailtip is questionable.

In the first picture here, there is a black smudge on the left side of the tree, lower than the "wing"; Cornell interprets this smudge as the bird's tail. However, if you look at the third picture at the link above, you can also see a black smudge at that same position on the tree. This black smudge still shows up even AFTER the "Ivory-bill" is seen flying away from the tree! Of course, by that point, the black smudge can no longer be interpreted as the bird's tail.
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Luneau video analysis

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2/21/06 update: The information below is now out-of-date. Please see my updated Luneau video analysis here.
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Regarding the Luneau video, John Fitzpatrick of Cornell states, “The bird captured on this video can be nothing other than an ivory-billed woodpecker.” Cornell's paper lists five "diagnostic features" allowing them to identify the subject as an Ivory-bill.

I disagree with Cornell in all five cases, and I believe the bird in the video is likely to be a completely normal Pileated Woodpecker. Below are "pro-Ivory-bill" arguments in black, along with my alternate analysis in red. (I've made most of these arguments before, but I thought it would be useful to group them all together in one posting).
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1. The bird's size, measured by wrist-to-tailtip on a perched bird, is supposed to be too large to fit a Pileated.

Please take a look at the first two pictures here. I think the inset sketch in the first picture is an incorrect interpretation of the position of the bird. In my opinion, the extensive white shown is not a view of the upperside of the wing on a perched bird; rather, it's a view of the wing lining of a bird that's already beginning to fly.

---1/23/06 update:
Jerome Jackson's January 2006 Auk article says that in his opinion, the "white shown extending from behind the tree is the large white patch present on the underside of the wing of a Pileated Woodpecker, held vertically, with the bird already in [full] flight."
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If I'm right, than any wrist-to-tailtip measurement is meaningless, since the wing is already in motion. If I'm right, we also have no reason to believe that the bird's upperwing contains more white than a typical Pileated's.

I think the next few frames of the video support my interpretation, because the bird essentially disappears behind the tree after a couple of frames of wing-flash to the left of the tree. If Cornell is right, and the bird is perched, I don't see how it could then simply disappear, at maybe 30 frames/second, without showing a few more frames of movement to the left of the tree.

I also think the blob shows far too much white to be correctly interpreted as perched Ivory-bill. The second picture at the link above shows Sibley's drawing of a perched Ivory-bill. Note that Sibley's picture shows white on basically the lower half of the wing, while the supposedly perched Ivory-bill from the video shows much more extensive white.

9/21/05 update:
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There's yet another potential problem with Cornell's wrist-to-tailtip measurement. I think the exact location of the tailtip is questionable.

In the first picture at the link above, there is a black smudge on the left side of the tree, lower than the "wing"; Cornell interprets this smudge as the bird's tail. However, if you look at the third picture at the link above, you can also see a black smudge at that same position on the tree. This black smudge still shows up even AFTER the bird is seen flying away from the tree! Of course, by that point, the black smudge can no longer be interpreted as the bird's tail.
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2. The wing pattern at rest (above) is supposed to show extensive white on the topside of the wing.

I think we're looking at the wing lining, not the topside. Please see analysis for #1 above.

3. The wing pattern in flight is supposed to fit only an Ivory-bill.

Nothing about the flying bird's wing pattern seems inconsistent with an ordinary Pileated woodpecker. More here.

4. There's supposed to be white plumage on the flying bird's back.

In Cornell's presentations, they show some carefully-selected frames that appear to show white on the bird's back, but I'm completely unconvinced that this white was present on the actual bird. I say that for two reasons:

1. I've studied the Luneau DVD frame-by-frame, and I see plenty of frames where the back looks entirely black.

2. If you watch the trees in the Luneau DVD, you can also see apparent white smudges on them that appear and then disappear.

5. About 20 seconds before we see the flying bird, we supposedly see a black-white-black pattern on the perched bird.

I think that object is likely just some out-of-focus vegetation, quite possible a branch stub. According to Jerome Jackson's January 2006 Auk article, John Fitzpatrick of Cornell has conceded this point.

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In addition to the five points above, the fleeing bird's flap rate and direct flight are supposed to support an Ivory-bill ID. I think the flap rate and direct flight are completely consistent with a fleeing Pileated (more detail here).

What does the future hold?

Maybe Cornell will capture the definitive Ivory-bill video tomorrow. It could happen, but I doubt it. Right now, if you asked me "What's your confidence level that there was a living Ivory-bill in Arkansas in 2004?", I'd say "Less than 5%".

Nobody knows what the future holds, but if I had to guess, I'd say this about the next twelve months:
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One year from today, we will still have no definitive proof of an Ivory-bill. Unverifiable sightings will continue; more low-quality photos and/or video will be captured, and inconclusive kents and double-knocks will surely be heard and recorded. Someone from outside the Cornell team may try to manufacture some evidence.

Public euphoria over Cornell's reported Ivory-bill rediscovery will wane. One or more critical papers will be published, and the public will eventually place little value on the evidence described in Cornell's Science paper. Massive numbers of birders will not travel to the Cache River area to look for the Ivory-bill.

By 9/19/06, believers will remain, but their ranks will be much thinner than today. Some will seriously speculate that the "Ivory-bill" sighted in Arkansas in 2004 was truly the last of his breed.
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Of course, I may be completely wrong.

Credits for three pictures on Flickr

Here are the credits for these three pictures on Flickr:

Picture 1 is from Cornell's Science paper.

Picture 2 is from sibleyguides.com.

Picture 3 is from the Luneau DVD, available for purchase here.

From the April press conference

I just watched all the videos from the April 28, 2005 Washington press conference where the "Ivory-bill rediscovery" was announced.

Jubilant, well-dressed VIPs are everywhere. The words "spectacular", "symbol", and "hero" are used many times. There's a lot of self-congratulation from many different parties, who speak at a podium in front of the American flag. (I was constantly reminded of the saying "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan").

Could this really all be a mistake?!

Unfortunately, yes.

I thought these videos were the most interesting:

John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Lab
He seems to relish pointing out that the Ivory-bill wasn't even included in the Sibley Guide.

Katrina Kelner, Editor at Science Magazine
Kelner mentions the peer review and stresses the video evidence, and says that the evidence "convinced even the most skeptical of experts". She says Cornell's paper is one "...we'll all remember for a long time". In this 2003 article, I found some criticism of peer review at Science.

Q-and-A session
Fitzpatrick says that the chances are "vanishingly small" that Gene Sparling's "ivory-bill" was the last one on earth.

Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior
One of the first things she says is that "...Department of the Interior scientists have also looked at the information, and they are likewise enthusiastic that we have actually spotted an Ivory-billed Woodpecker".