Hoping for a flyby

There's some new "Ivory-billed Woodpecker Search Team 2005-2006" information on Cornell's web site. Below are two excerpts with my comments (the bold font is mine):

Beth Wright, Volunteer Coordinator, Cache River NWR
Beth will be leading groups of six to eight volunteers at a time, focusing on the Bayou de View area of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. These are the folks who will be hunkered down in a dozen or so blinds, hoping for an ivory-bill flyby to rock their world.

The fact that they are "hoping for a flyby" strikes at the very heart of the problem. We're into the fourth Ivory-bill search season in Arkansas, and the "robust sightings" and video(s) have been uniformly poor. It is very nearly certain that "Elvis" has been seen well (perched) any number of times, and he's not an Ivory-bill.

David Luneau
During the last field season, David captured video footage of what many experts believe to be an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. He is a professor of Electronics and Computers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and serves as an advisor in the technical intricacies of capturing an ivory-bill on tape.

If the bird could ever be found, the "technical intricacies" would be minimal.

Interesting blog comments

Check out the comments to this post on Cyberthrush's blog.

Highland Park News Ivory-bill article

There's an Ivory-bill article at the Highland Park News here. Below are some excerpts with my comments:

News of its possible rediscovery made the front page of The New York Times and stirred extensive debate about the accuracy of the sighting.

The initial news was not about "possible" rediscovery. John Fitzpatrick said it was "dead solid confirmed".

The bird [red-headed woodpecker], though not endangered, is experiencing a decline in numbers so much so that it could be headed toward extinction, Fitzpatrick said.

The sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker offers hope and encouragement for the red-headed woodpecker.

Regarding the red-headed woodpecker, I think it's far too early to play the extinction card. According to this link, the Audubon red-headed woodpecker population estimate is 2.5 million birds.

The Conservancy, along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Arkansas Department of Natural Resources, owns the 500,000 acres of deep-water swamp and floodplain forest where the bird was discovered. To create the type of contiguous habitat the species needs, another 200,000 acres must be preserved.

Ok, we're starting with 500,000 acres (781 square miles) of habitat. Given that a pair's Singer Tract range in the breeding season was 4 square miles, that 500,000 acres could conceivably harbor 195 breeding pairs. Now we're saying that that's not nearly enough acreage--we need an additional 200,000 acres (312 square miles)?!

Of course, the Big Woods habitat is not nearly as good as the Singer Tract habitat, but is it really that much worse?

To me, it seems a tad premature to talk about the need for an additional 312 square miles of habitat for this species. After all, the "best" proof we have for its existence is a video so poor that even a believer allows it may show an albinistic Wood duck.

TNC killing healthy trees

There are some "Updates from the Nature Conservancy" here (the bold font is mine):

But because much of the old-growth in the Big Woods was heavily cut over, what’s growing now is relatively young with very few trees in decline. There were six to eight dying trees per acre in the Louisiana forests when Tanner studied the ivory-bill; today our study are in the Big Woods contains only two to three such trees per acre.

Of the 2,600 to 2,800 trees in each plot, 35 to 50 are being treated either by girdling (using a chain saw or ax to cut a ring into the bark) or by injection with a low dose of the chemical glyphosate, a naturally occurring hormone in plants.

According to this link, glyphosate is the primary ingredient in Monsanto's popular herbicide Roundup.

In North American Birds (Dec '04-Feb '05 issue, page 218) the Ivory-bill's habitat requirements do seem a poor match for the Big Woods description above:

The Ivory-billed was thus a unique indicator species, occupying a niche position in the process of forest decline, a species whose abundance was more dependent on rates of tree death than on accumulating stocks of standing dead wood.

If you believe the Ivory-bill survived through 2004, you must believe that it did so without us killing any trees on its behalf. I'm not quite sure why theoretical Ivory-bills suddenly need our help now...

An "X Prize" for Ivory-bill proof?

I think there is very little hope that the Ivory-bill still lives, but for those with more hope, I think the X prize model is worth investigating (the bold font is mine):

The Ansari X Prize is a $10,000,000 prize offered as part of an international competition intended to jumpstart the space tourism industry and encourage private-sector development of rocket ships. The prize will be awarded to the first team of entrepreneurs and rocket experts that privately finances and builds a reusable spaceship that carries two people (or the equivalent weight) into space (100 kilometers or 62.5 miles altitude), returns them to earth safely, and repeats the achievement with the same vehicle within two weeks. Sponsored by the X Prize Foundation, with major funding from the Ansari family of Dallas, the Ansari Prize was inspired by the Orteig prize of 1927, which awarded the Spirit of St. Louis Organization $25,000 upon Charles Lindbergh's historic crossing of the Atlantic in 1927.

Although over two dozen teams from around the world tried to win the X Prize, none of them managed to reach space before SpaceShipOne won the prize by blasting through the atmosphere for the second time in one week on October 4, 2004.

Following SpaceShipOne's success, the X Prize Foundation and the World Technology Network announced a joint venture in which they would create a series of incentive prizes to help spur innovation and breakthroughs in a range of scientific areas such as medicine, environmental studies, energy, nanotechnology, and informatics.

If you had, for example, a well-publicized one million dollar prize for definitive proof of a living Ivory-bill, you could harness the power of an awful lot of hunters/fisherman/campers etc that already spend thousands or millions of hours in potential Ivory-bill country. With that kind of incentive, you would also inspire a lot of other people to specifically look for Ivory-bills and to thoroughly check out potential Ivory-bill sightings (taking a camera with them!).

Considering the amount of money currently being thrown at the "Ivory-bill", I think a $1 million prize for definitive proof actually makes some sense. (We've read that the cost of this year's Cornell search is $800,000, and there's another $10.2 million of Ivory-bill spending detailed here).

Thoughts from Julie Zickefoose

Julie Zickefoose posted this today:

We're all hanging in limbo, waiting for that photograph, that video, that confirmation that means we don't just have to take someone's word for it that the ivory-bill is back. Until then, all I can paint is ambiguity, because that's really all we have. I've watched David Luneau's famous video clip 900 times, and I thoroughly believe that's an ivory-bill, but there are plenty of people who don't think so. The questions swirl and the undertow of disbelief is stronger with each passing month. We're hungry for more.

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".

8% searched?

Monday's Chicago Tribune contains the old "8% searched" spin again, this time from Scott Simon, director of the Arkansas Nature Conservancy:

"We're searching through more than half a million acres," Simon said, "and last year our search covered only 8 percent of the ecosystem."

I think Simon's statement is disingenuous. I think Cornell searcher Tim Barksdale was more candid when he wrote this last May (the bold font is mine):

Few key areas still remain to be searched. But we have only used transects in 8% of this huge area.

Ivory-bill resort for sale

At this link, there is an "Ivory Bill Woodpecker Resort" for sale. The property is located a couple of miles from Brinkley, Arkansas, on what looks like sub-optimal habitat.

Some locals discuss the property here.

Another abnormal Pileated report

Here is yet another abnormal Pileated report. There's a lot more about abnormal Pileateds here.

I think the Cornell team ignored a basic point: nowadays, any bird that looks like a Pileated but has "too much" white on the wings or back is vastly more likely to be a Pileated than an Ivory-bill.

In all of "The Grail Bird", I don't see any mention of abnormal Pileateds, which to me is a shocking omission. (In fact, I used Amazon's "Search Inside the Book", and I find no occurrences of "abnormal", "leucistic" or "aberrant" anywhere in that book).

Baltimore Sun/LA Times Ivory-bill stories

1. The Los Angeles Times published a short article today on the Ivory-bill:

And here in Monroe County, where a quarter of residents live in poverty, merchants stocked up on bird-related souvenirs and waited for tourists.

But with fresh sightings of the ivory-bill yet to be confirmed, "we're still waiting for the tourist part," hairdresser Penny Childs said.
...
Not everyone is convinced that the bird exists, believing that the blurry video actually shows the pileated variety.

"It's absolutely necessary to get a better video, a clear still shot, sightings that are irrefutable," Mallard [Larry, manager of the White River National Wildlife Refuge] said. "If that were to happen or let's say you found a roost tree, you'd see the kind of interest you've never seen before.

"It would show that Elvis is in the building."

2. The Baltimore Sun also published a small Ivory-bill article today, which talks about a recent trip to Bayou DeView by Jerome Jackson. Jackson is identified as "one of the skeptics about the ivory bill sightings":

Seeing a bird is a matter of skill and knowledge and just plain good luck. Professionals can come up empty-handed. Amateurs can make extraordinary finds.

Did those who spotted the Arkansas ivory bills have the right combination? Or did they just see something that they desperately wanted to see?