Any honest birder will admit that fleeting glimpses, lousy looks, and wishful thinking too often lead to identification errors.
On one memorable occasion, I happened to be standing next to a very well-known Minnesota birder--this is a guy with decades of field experience, a guy who has written extensively on bird identification, a guy who is thanked by name in numerous bird books. As a distant falcon approached, he dramatically shouted "PEREGRINE!! PEREGRINE!!" and pointed in the bird's direction, for the benefit of the stragglers of the birding group he was leading. Shortly afterward, as the approaching bird allowed a better look, he sheepishly shouted (less loudly) something along the lines of "never mind, um, it's only a kestrel".
No birder who's ever lived is immune to such mistakes, and of course, I certainly am not immune. As I've written here previously, I once mistook distant black dots as wolves, when in fact they were ravens.
My point is that given a decent look, a birding expert can tell a peregrine from a kestrel with 100% certainty, and I can very reliably distinguish a raven from a wolf. Give us a fleeting glimpse or a lousy look, however, and the probability of error skyrockets.
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3 comments:
Well it is interesting that there have been sightings as recently as 1995 of the Imperial Woodpecker in Mexico, where there are no Pileated Woodpeckers. Yet the bird is also considered extinct. Recently there was another sighting by 2 birders, according to someone on the web, but subsequent searches found nothing.
Even where sightings cannot be confused with any other known bird,
Imperials are considered extinct by many experts. (Tanner went to look for them with his son in 1962 - no luck).
So yes there may be a pervasive
tendency to believe if we don't see it, it is extinct. So we feel bad for the people who are shouldering the burden of "proving otherwise" if we poke holes in their evidence.
Tom mostly sticks to poking holes
in the evidence. I enjoy it immensely and maybe pointing out that Elvis in Arkansas is really
a weird pileated will help focus
the search in deeper, thicker or
more suitable habitat than where Elvis was found. Maybe they will
find IBWs in the places where often elderly bird-watchers never travel.
I can't seriously believe that hunters pay much attention to IBWs.
For a start we should probably consider the counties/parishes where there are no Christmas Counts etc, or BBS, and yet the habitat is good.
So questioning the evidence might actually help the bird if it exists but is somewhere besides the Cache or White River areas.
Paul - New Paltz NY
The problem with that thought
is that all of the bottomland
areas outside of the National
Wildlife Refuges is made up
of soybean and rice farms -
hardly Ivory-bill habitat.
Yeah, hmmm, I had a response from a 'expert' in the area of Southern Swamp forest ... his area of study.
He refutes the assertion that there is not much swamp forest down there in the South. Maybe it's true about Arkansas that soybean fields surround all these reserves. His view is that the swamp forest is vast and somewhat untracked. I've been to the Adirondacks in my state...that's vast to me. Good point, good question. Can a medium sized preserve, the size of a county...
can that contain more than 10 birds? Are the strips of river edge forest... do these provide the glue to make the scattered preserves a contiguous habitat?
Good good questions!
Paul - New Paltz, NY
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