Woodpecker stamp press release

Larry Chandler issued this press release yesterday.

Here are a few snippets. As always, unless otherwise noted, I've added the bold font:

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Most ornithologists who were skeptical after seeing the original scientific evidence presented, including a short and fuzzy video of the bird in flight, were convinced it exists after hearing new audio released to the public at the American Ornithologists Union meeting August 24, 2005.
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Proceeds from the sale of conservation stamps and prints will be evenly divided between The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, The Nature Conservancy and the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation.
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Because stamp collecting is considered to be among most popular hobbies all across the globe, publisher Larry Grisham said "I expect we could sell over 200,000 of these stamps, which would raise well over a million dollars to help protect this gravely endangered woodpecker species."
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The Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation is the non-profit arm of the state wildlife department in Arkansas which is called the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. They plan to use their portion of the proceeds for public education, which will be needed for long-term protection of the bird.
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Sparling/Fitzpatrick on public radio

Here is a link to a 53-min RealAudio public radio show on the Ivory-bill, with Gene Sparling and John Fitzpatrick.

Re: Ivory-bills by the numbers

Cyberthrush put up a post attempting to use math to argue that it's unlikely that the Ivory-bill could have disappeared "in a mere 60 years". I admire the effort, but I think he's vastly overestimating the bird's nesting success and vastly underestimating the bird's natural mortality.

On nesting success: Cyberthrush assumes 6 nesting attempts resulting in 10 fledglings; in Tanner's book, 6 real-life Singer Tract nesting attempts resulted in a total of only 3 fledglings.

On natural mortality: Cyberthrush has the average fledgling living to 10 years of age. I don't doubt that a lucky Ivory-bill could live to be 10, but assuming that the average bird lived to be 10 is a huge stretch.

It's a dangerous world out there, especially if you're a bird. We don't have data for Ivory-bill natural mortality, but consider this "Birds of North America" data for Pileateds:
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Of 31 radio-tagged adults followed for 2 yr in ne. Oregon, 55% survived (ELB). In w. Washington, 43% of radio-tagged adults survived 1 yr (K. Aubry and C. Raley pers. comm.).
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In other words, roughly half the Pileated adults died off every year or two. Under those conditions, a fledgling would be lucky to live to 3 or 4 years of age.

Also note that Tanner said (page 83) that "...it is possible that the greatest factor reducing the rate of reproduction of the Ivory-bill is the failure of some birds to nest".

Bottom line: The data is incomplete, but I'm not convinced that the Singer Tract birds were breeding at replacement value. I think it's possible that the Ivory-bill would have become extinct even if the Singer Tract had been left undisturbed.

Hundreds of duck hunters in the Cache River area?

On a BirdForum thread, I found these two quotes about the Cache River Ivory-bill search area:
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"Its amazing that this bird has lasted in that corridor because its filled with duck blinds where hundreds of duck hunters go each year."

"Winter is the time to go... but be aware from thanksgiving until about the end of January it is inundated with hundreds if not thousands of duck hunters. You will find duck hunters will return courtesy in kind.... IE don't head up the cache at 9AM and drive through everyones decoys...

We've spent years hunting waterfowl on the cache, and mostly in the areas where the Ivory-Billed has been spotted..."
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Some people have the impression that no duck hunter knows about any other species, but that's simply not true. Some duck hunters are skilled birders, and they would recognize an Ivory-bill, given a good look. If you believe that there are Ivory-bills in Arkansas, you must not only believe that the birds have somehow avoided giving Cornell's team a good look. You must also believe that they've avoided all those camoflauge-clad hunters year after year, inundating the area for weeks when the trees are bare.

At this link, there is an announcement that waterfowl hunting will continue in the area this season. There's a new permit system in place that will allow a maximum of 76 people per day into the 7.5-square-mile "Managed Access Area".

Here are the duck hunting dates and bag limits. I think it's notable that Pintail duck hunting will be allowed in the area, even though Tanner said "In flight the Ivory-bill looks surprisingly like a Pintail".

Some skeptical thoughts from Patrick Coin

Of the alleged Ivory-bill rediscovery, Patrick Coin writes "...now I'm becoming WAY more skeptical."

Patrick's reasons are detailed in this thread.

Good photographic documentation

I've touched on this topic before, but it may be useful to again check out some good bird photographs to gain some perspective on just how lousy the Cornell pictures are.

At this link, there are many examples of the high-quality bird photos that are regularly captured these days.

After you've enjoyed that "eye candy" for a while, take a look at these blobs. Optimists might interpret some of these as the best images in decades of a living Ivory-bill; I'd say it's far more likely that all the blobs are just out-of-focus dead branches or other vegetation.

Photo of some Cache River habitat

It may be worthwhile to see a photo of some of the Cache River habitat. In "The Grail Bird", there's a picture taken of the spot where Gallagher and Harrison saw their "Ivory-bill" in February 2004. This picture was taken just 30 minutes after the sighting.

I don't have a direct link to the picture, but you may be able to use Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature to see it online. Here's a link to the book. If you move your cursor over the picture of the book cover on the left, a search box should come up. If you type in "gene sparling paddles his kayak" in that box, you should be able to click on the resulting link to see the picture.

Note that the habitat doesn't seem to be a good match for the ancient, mature habitat that the Ivory-bill was said to prefer.

Please also note the lack of cover in the bare, leafless trees. During a massive search effort, I think it would be virtually impossible for a large, conspicuous, noisy Ivory-bill to be seen 8-18 times in this area without anyone getting good looks and good pictures.

Identifying field marks of an IBWO and similar birds

Here is an excellent field mark comparison page from David Sibley. It shows various views of the Ivory-bill along with corresponding views of Pileated Woodpecker, Wood Duck, and Red-headed Woodpecker.

Given a fleeting glimpse (and maybe a strong desire to see an Ivory-bill), any of the latter three birds could be the source of mis-IDs.

More on the Ivory-bill's supposed elusiveness

I mentioned the recent Smithsonian magazine Ivory-bill article a few posts ago. I want to specifically address this snippet from that article:
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If the hunt in Arkansas holds a particular lesson, it's that this is a surpassingly elusive bird, more like a will-o'-the-wisp than a living animal...Now some experts speculate that the noisy, tame ones were all shot and only those that were wary around humans survived.
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To believe in the Ivory-bill's survival at this point, I think it's necessary to believe this "surpassingly elusive" argument. However, I think the argument is not logical or rational, and we've got no evidence to support it. I think there's no reason to believe that an Ivory-bill in 2005 would be any more wary than an Ivory-bill in 1935.

I've blogged about this subject here, here, and here, but I wanted to write a little more today.

In some current articles, I see an almost anthropomorphic undertone--the bird realized it was threatened with extinction, and so it resolved to be so wary that it could no longer be found. To me, it makes no sense to think that the birds could still be half-tame when maybe a dozen remained, then suddenly became far more wary than any woodpecker ever known by mankind.

Put yourself in the Ivory-bill's position and think about how you would continually avoid about 20 camoflauge-clad observers during the field season in the Cache River area. You need to feed in full daylight, often up high in the bare trees. You are large and conspicuously colored, and every time you fly, you are a sight that inspired people to call you "The Lord God Bird". Some people are quietly moving in boats, others are sitting quietly watching the best roost holes, feeding areas, and crossing points. Everyone's armed with high-quality optics and cameras. You somehow have to avoid the remote cameras too. You roost in holes at night, and as far as you know, cameras are trained on the entrance holes waiting for you to emerge every morning.

In two or three field seasons, do you think it's likely that the observers would get only one or two dozen poor looks, but never a good look or photograph?

Ok, now let's say you don't have human intelligence. You're just a bird that has no way of knowing it's almost extinct, and let's say your species has been half-tame, loud and conspicuous for hundreds or thousands of generations. How likely is it that an army of observers will never get one good look at you after two or more seasons of intensive searching?

Just for the benefit of any new readers--I think it's very likely that all of Cornell's "confirmed Ivory-bill" sightings were mis-IDs. I think it's no accident that all the views were poor ones. I think it's very likely that the bird(s) involved were seen well any number of times by the search team, but, given a good view, they were clearly Pileateds (or other species).

Don Eckelberry's Ivory-bill description

Don Eckelberry saw the last documented American Ivory-bill in 1944. At this link, I found his description of one encounter with this bird:
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"She came trumpeting in to the roost, her big wings cleaving the air in strong, direct flight, and she alighted with one magnificent upward swoop. Looking about wildly with her hysterical pale eyes, tossing her head from side to side, her black crest erect to the point of leaning forward, she hitched up the tree at a gallop, trumpeting all the way. Near the top she became suddenly quiet and began preening herself. With a few disordered feathers properly and vigorously rearranged, she gave her distinctive double rap, the second blow following so closely on the first that it was almost like an echo--an astonishingly loud, hollow, drumlike Bam-am! Then she hitched down the tree and sidled around to the roost hole, looked in, looked around, hitched down beneath the entrance, double-rapped, and went in.
"At 7:20, after I had finished all my notes and we were about to leave, she popped out and raced up the trunk to its broken top where, bathed in rich orange light of the setting sun, she alternately preened and jerked her head about in a peculiar, angular way, quite unlike the motions of any other woodpecker I knew. I was tremendously impressed by the majestic and wild personality of this bird, its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness."
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If the Ivory-bill still lives, I think we would likely have recent, clear video documentation of similar encounters.

Another anecdote from Jim Tanner

This paragraph appears on page 63 of Jim Tanner's book "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker":
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The center of the Ivory-bills' feeding territory in the John's Bayou area was logged during the summer of 1941, tractors, trucks, and men creating much disturbance there. At the time there were at least three Ivory-bills, an adult pair and a juvenal, in the area. By December of that year the adult male had disappeared, where or for cause unknown, but the female and juvenal were still roosting and feeding in the same territory. At least two of the three birds had been little affected by the presence of many men and machines.
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No hard evidence after three field seasons in Arkansas

I just noticed this sentence:
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With support from the Arkansas Audubon Society Trust, he [Luneau] organized and led a less-extended expedition in January of 2003 to look for ivory-bills in Arkansas’ White River National Wildlife Refuge.
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That means that "prime-time" Arkansas expeditions in early 2003, 2004, and 2005 have already been completed with no hard evidence of an Ivory-bill. I think it's unlikely that the core problem here is "not enough searching", and I think it's unlikely that field season #4 will finally yield the definitive photograph(s).

Remember, some 20,000 hours have already been expended since Sparling's initial report, and the reported sightings occurred in a small (four-square-kilometer) area.

In that small area, if you were ever going to gather conclusive proof of an Ivory-bill, I think you'd probably already have it after the first couple hundred hours of "prime time" searching. By the time you'd racked up 1,000 or 2,000 hours without hard evidence, I think it would be sensible to question whether the bird was present. If you expanded the search area and racked up five, ten, or twenty thousand hours without hard evidence, at some point you'd need to face the real prospect that your glimpses, fuzzy pictures, and audio may all be "false positives".

DNA testing update

In an earlier post, I mentioned the possibility of doing DNA tests on any potential Ivory-bill feathers found in the field.

At this link, a lab specifically advertises this type of testing for $23, with a turnaround time of five business days.