Why all the secrecy?

The Birdchick is scheduled to do some official volunteer Ivory-bill searching next month. She writes:

The first rule about the Cornell Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search is you do not talk about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search. The second rule about the Cornell Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search is you do not talk about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search...

Now, of course you wouldn't want people posting GPS coordinates on the net if they ever found an Ivory-bill roosting location. However, putting a lid on all speech seems excessive.

Regarding Cornell's claimed Ivory-bill rediscovery, the "cat is pretty far out of the bag" already. After all, Cornell has already published a detailed map (North American Birds, Dec '04-Feb '05, page 199) showing exactly where each claimed sighting occurred.

If you put excessive secrecy measures in place at this point, people might justifiably wonder whether you have something to hide.

Some of the following could conceivably be among the "hidden items":

1. Original field notes, sketches and videotaped interviews describing all possible sightings

2. Information about (and pictures of) abnormal Pileateds in the area

3. The Imperial Woodpecker video

4. Candid observations about how much of the area has been searched, and how "inaccessible" it truly is

5. Information that privately, not all searchers may leave Arkansas as "true believers"

6. Information about the "dead branch"/"six-pixel ivory-bill" in the Luneau video

7. Maybe Cornell has video that shows a Pileated briefly flying at greater than 7.5 flaps/sec

8. Maybe Cornell has video of a fleeing known Pileated that looks uncomfortably similar to the Luneau bird

9. Information about Pileated Woodpeckers observed doing double-raps in the search area

10. Information about the true birding experience level of some of the observers

Right now, many skeptics feel that Cornell is releasing information selectively (heavily favoring information that can be spun in favor of the Ivory-bill rediscovery story).

In my opinion, good science demands that the countervailing information also be released.

IE/Mac blog viewing problems

Some readers have had problems viewing this blog from the Mac platform when using Internet Explorer. When using that combination, your browser may "hang" or you may not be able to navigate on this site.

I've reported this problem to Blogger support. In the meantime, Mac users can work around the problem by using Safari or Firefox browsers.

Smallest viable population is 20-30 birds?

John Fitzpatrick has an interesting answer to the very last question at the end of his AOU presentation here.

Someone asked about Ivory-bill population demographics, and Fitzpatrick said that some calculations had already been done to answer this question: "How many would there have to be around the South to make it possible [for them] to have existed with some degree of confidence to the present?"

The answer was about 20 or 30 birds. Fitzpatrick called this answer "intuitively, a fairly comfortable one", and I agree. That means that for the Ivory-bill to live today, a population of tens of birds must have avoided confirmed detection for 61+ years now, which seems highly implausible to me.

Of course, that would also imply that current Ivory-bill searchers are most likely looking for a population of at least 20-30 Ivory-bills, rather than seeking a single presumed impossibly-wary ghost bird ranging over an 800+ square mile area.

What day did that "powerful windstorm" hit?

Just a follow-up to my previous post...

On page 156 of "The Grail Bird", Tim Gallagher writes:

On our last day in the swamp, a powerful windstorm came up . Shocking in its violence and intensity, the wind roared through the forest canopy, bending and shaking the tops of the tall trees. Huge limbs creaked and moaned and frequently came crashing down near us, causing an explosion of water. At times it felt like being in the target zone of a mortar attack. For the entire day we rarely saw or heard any birds.

Again, according to the official timeline, the Gallagher/Harrison Cache River sighting took place on 2/27/04, and Gallagher informed Fitzpatrick in person at Cornell on 3/1/04.

A reader pointed out that we can take a look at historical NOAA wind reports here (below the midpoint of the screen, there's a box where you can type in the date of your choice).

Sometime between the two dates above, given Gallagher's storm description, I'd expect to see some wind reports from Arkansas, but I don't see any until Thursday, 3/4/04.

I'm not claiming that this question is necessarily of huge importance, yet I'm curious. Again, if anyone has some helpful information on the windstorm/timeline questions, please drop me an email.

The odd "Grail Bird" timeline

The timeline for Tim Gallagher's critical February 2004 Cache River trip doesn't make sense to me. Gallagher seems to describe about four days of Cache River searching after his Feb 27 sighting, while the official timeline seems to allow for only one day of searching.

Let's start on page 152 of "The Grail Bird", where Harrison and Gallagher saw a flying "Ivory-bill" on February 27, 2004. Below, in red, I've included some additional dates that a reasonable reader might estimate:

The next day (page 155), they floated downstream. After some wood ducks exploded from the water, Harrison pointed far to the rear and to the right:

...he felt certain that it was our bird again, giving us one more tantalizing fly-by. That was all we got that day [Feb 28], and there was nothing the next [Feb 29] or the next [Mar 1]."

On our last day in the swamp [Mar 2], a powerful windstorm came up...Huge limbs creaked and moaned and frequently came crashing down near us, causing an explosion of water... For the entire day, we rarely saw or heard any birds.

Starting on page 159, we see this:

The next morning [Mar 3] we broke camp and headed back to the bridge at Highway 17...Bobby dropped me off at the Memphis airport...I got into Rochester airport about midnight...At 8:30 [am] sharp, I was standing outside his [Fitz'] office [Mar 4].

However, in numerous places on the Internet, we are told that the Gallagher/Fitz meeting actually took place not on March 4 but on Monday, Mar 1.

On March 1, 2004, just 3 days after the sighting, Gallagher arrived sleep deprived and agitated at the office of Cornell lab director John Fitzpatrick.

So how can we reconcile the "reasonable reader" dates above with a March 1 Gallagher/Fitz meeting, which would make Feb 29 a travel day? Could the following four described days actually be just one day (Feb 28) in reality!?: The "one more tantalizing fly-by" day, the two following fruitless days of searching, and the "powerful windstorm" day?

If anyone has a reasonable explanation for all of this, please email me and I'll update this post.

I stumbled onto this "timeline" question after seeing this sentence on page 157 of The Grail Bird:

I hadn't slept for more than an hour each night for several days.

With the Gallagher/Fitz meeting to happen on Mar 1, the above sentence seems to apply to Gallagher as of Feb 28. This could mean that Gallagher was suffering from sleep deprivation during his sighting on Feb 27.

Another mistake?

This press release was issued on Friday, 11/18/05:

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS—After reviewing evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker gathered in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in April 2004, the Bird Records Committee of the Arkansas Audubon Society has voted to change the status of the bird in Arkansas from ''extirpated'' to ''present''.

Max Parker, longtime curator for the Arkansas Audubon Society, received on June 17, 2005, verifying documentation for the extraordinary record from a member of the research team. The documentation was studied at length by all members of the Arkansas Bird Records Committee before the record was accepted.

...At least four of the five committee members must vote for acceptance before the sightings become part of the official record.

When I read this release, a few questions came to mind:

1. Why is the wording so vague, ie instead of saying "documentation for the extraordinary record from a member of the research team" why don't they just say that they are talking specifically about the video submitted by David Luneau? (Several sources tell me that that is the case).

2. Why was the video not submitted for nearly two months after the late-April announcement, and why was it not accepted until about five more months had passed?

3. Was the vote unanimous?

4. Why haven't the sight records been submitted?

5. By definition, the listed public skeptics (including Jackson, Prum, Robbins, and Sibley) are not convinced by the video. What does the Arkansas Bird Records Committtee see in the video that these highly-qualified skeptics don't see?