"It was the first time two qualified observers had seen the bird simultaneously since 1944," Gallagher. explains "That made a difference. And I'm a conservative birder. I've never made a bogus call."
...
"There are a lot of reasons to believe the ivory-bill woodpecker is an extinct species," says Richard Prum, who is the curator of ornithology at Yale University's Peabody museum.
"All of the proffered evidence, and there is not a lot, is incomplete and inconclusive," Prum tells me when I speak to him by telephone. "All of the people who have seen it fleetingly are true believers and magical things happen to true believers."
Prum claims there is no scientific reason why the bird should not be able to be found, if it is alive, and that with so many people searching the area, it could not avoid detection indefinitely. "If these people haven't produced irrefutable evidence by the end of the field season in April, then they will have a lot of explaining to do," he says.
Harrison has his own theories as to why the bird is proving so elusive: "I think there are too many people searching at this point," he says. "This is a very wary bird and so going from the hotel to the swamp every day and visiting doesn't work. I think you have to live out there for a while. Also the area is so huge."
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Every experienced birder I've known has made a bad identification call at one time or another. (I've made a lot!) I studied a Scaup species once with a professional field biologist (a much better birder than I). We looked at it for several minutes through a good telescope. All the marks indicated Greater Scaup--"jizz", head shape, bill nail, etc. Plus, it was in salt water, where Greaters are more likely found. When it took off, we saw the wing stripe clearly showing it was a Lesser Scaup. The biologist laughed, and we both shrugged.
Experienced birders make few mistakes, but I don't think anybody makes none.
I think Harrison may consider a Bogus call is where you go home, consult the field-guides and your notes from the day and with a degree of misplaced certainty, still produce a big mistake
that then gets further press.
Versus bad-id which gets cleared up
before the car leaves the parking lot.
It is sometimes possible to correctly identify an ambiguous bird with only seconds of viewing time.
It's tough to believe ALL these visual sightings were in the that category. Except when it comes to
fixating on a fieldmark that may
exist in another aberrant bird, like a pileated having a trailing white wing edge. However it does become quite a number of mistakes when you
add all the recent sightings (2004 to date). Tom points out that nobody talks about the other field marks or about "Kents" and "double knocks". And these would
make the sightings much more believable. On the other hand,
the jizz of an IBWO may be quite different from a Pileated.
But few still living people have experienced both species first-hand.
Paul Sutera, New Paltz, NY
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