You may have noticed that when you search for something like "ivory-billed woodpecker" on Google, you sometimes see a sponsored link for my blog. Is this proof that my Ivory-bill writing is actually sponsored by some sort of Evil Arkansas Duck Hunting Cabal?
Sorry, no. No one has ever paid me a dime. I'm paying for those ads out of my own pocket. I think of it this way: for the price of one round-trip flight to Arkansas, I can buy a whole lot of hits from Google, because they're dirt cheap. I believe this is an important issue, and I firmly believe that my facts and logic are correct. I do spend considerable time on my writing, and it's worthwhile to me to spend a few bucks to reach a wider audience.
(To me, it's especially heartwarming to look at my sitemeter and see where a sponsored click has resulted in someone spending over an hour on the blog, maybe generating 50 or more page views.)
The percentage of "paid" traffic to this blog is becoming less and less significant. As it becomes easier to find this blog (through natural, "unpaid" search) etc, I may well drop the ads.
A related question is: Are you doing this all just to promote yourself? Again, the answer is no. I'm not doing this for the publicity; I'm doing it despite the publicity.
As a result of my stand on this issue, I have faced a quite astonishing amount of profanity-laced invective and ridicule. My stand is costing me money, it's costing me time, and it's causing people to publicly say terrible things about me; however, I'm not backing down, because I'm speaking the truth as I know it.
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6 comments:
Evil duck hunting cabal'ers unite!
But Tom, why worry, you have lots of supporters here, even the fence-sitters and believers.
You could decide not to respond to the negative posts of people who are just angry. When I came home from college, my dad was mad at me for using "big" words. He was dealing with his own issues, and same here. You could be debating the fine points of suntanning techniques, or leg hair removal... and you'd still get real cranky people. Maybe the forum is serving you as well as the bird, or Cornell, or science. That's your right. The angry ones keep coming back for more!
Paul - New Paltz, NY
Another "amen", albeit from a different row of pews than the "evil duck hunters". I maintain my proposition: Obtain a digitized version (MS Word, for example) of one of the recent IBWO reports. Use the "search and replace" function in the software to substitute "Bigfoot" for "IBWO", and the verbs "to walk" and "to climb" for the verb "to fly". Make any other needed grammatical amendments. Then, hand the "Bigfoot" report to any of the many IBWO faithful & see if they're willing to spend $$$ on massive hunts, symposia, etc.
Fundamental difference: we know for sure that Ivorybills were real animals, there are lots in museums and unequivocal photos from the 40s and earlier. There has never been ANY physical documentaiton that bigfoots ever existed.
"Fundamental difference" misses the point. In the last 60+ years, there has been one suspect feather of an IBWO. One. And I'm unsure how it was "ascertained" that this was from an IBWO. No museum skins. No road-kills. No window-kills. No remains in owl pellets. No remains in raptor nests. No catches in bird-banding nets. No fledglings dragged up by the neighbor's cat. And almost all of the suspect visual sightings and images have been eliminated as possibilities when an experienced field observer looked for the bird or reviewed the images.
Do I think IBWOs could exist? Yeah, but it's a huge stretch. What's amazing is all the clatter as the birding community, a notoriously skeptic group, tossed away Occam's Razor in the stampede to follow this romantic notion.
"I'm speaking the truth as I know it."
Ah. I don't know "the truth." I merely hold opinions, some more strongly than others.
I can see how someone might argue that skeptics are setting an artificially high burden of proof. I don't think the skeptics' standard is too high, though. What set the burden of proof so high is the LACK of physical evidence over the past six decades that argues against the continued existence of IBWOs. How many other birds (including Pils) have left recent remains? Car-kills, cat-kills, window-kills, raptor pellets, feathers, eggs, mist-nest catches, foraging damage to trees, etc.? One feather in 60 years?! The lack of sightings of IBWOs only adds icing to the IBWO extinction "cake".
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