More on Jackson's Auk article

Just a few additional snippets from Jerome Jackson's January 2006 Auk article (the bold font and italics are mine):

In 1986,U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service appointed an Advisory Committee to evaluate the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a species that had been on U.S. endangered species lists since their inception. James Tanner, who was the foremost authority on the species, Lester Short, a leading authority on woodpeckers of the world, and I served on the committee...Both Tanner and Short were prepared to declare the species extinct, given that more than 50 years had passed without confirmation of its existence.

I think it's significant that Tanner and Short were ready to prepare the Ivory-bill extinct in 1986. A whole lot of searching has been done in the ensuing twenty years, and to me, it's undeniably discouraging to think that the "best" hard evidence since then is probably an out-of-focus video of a Pileated Woodpecker.

...I have watched both Pileated and Red-bellied woodpeckers making such [double] raps.
...
Announcement of the report of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Arkansas came with the spectacular news that $10.2 million had been allocated by the federal government for the recovery effort, $5 million from the Department of the Interior and $5.2 million from the Department of Agriculture (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2005b). Then reality set in. Proposed expenditures for land acquisition and habitat protection are mostly a continuation of efforts under the North American Waterfowl Management Plan and by The Nature Conservancy that were already in progress when the presence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was reported (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2005b; Allan Mueller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, pers. comm.). In addition, the funding was not a new appropriation, but a re-allocation of funds from other budgeted projects, including ongoing efforts on behalf of other endangered species (Dalton 2005), resulting in cutbacks to those projects.
...
On the same day as the press release regarding the discovery of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Arkansas, the scientific report of the discovery appeared in Sciencexpress online; on 3 June, it appeared in the pages of Science. While the world rejoiced, my elation turned to disbelief. I had seen the “confirming” video in news releases and recognized its poor quality, but I had believed. Then I saw figure 1 from Fitzpatrick et al. (2005a) and seriously doubted that this evidence was confirmation of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Even a cursory comparison of this figure with the photographs by Arthur Allen and James Tanner or the art by Audubon or Wilson shows that the white on the wing of the bird, said to be perched behind the tree with only a portion of its right wing and tail exposed, is too extensive to be that of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
...
My opinion is that the bird in the Luneau video is a normal Pileated Woodpecker. I believe that 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 flight.
...
Prum and Mark Robbins, as senior authors, decided to withdraw the manuscript “so as not to muddy the conservation waters” (R. O. Prum pers. comm.). They had not analyzed the audio, but made the decision on the basis of their familiarity with the recordings made by Arthur Allen and with the double raps of other Campephilus woodpeckers.
...
...at Bayou de View, I was never out of hearing range of highway traffic.