The ivory-billed woodpecker may have faded back into extinction. After more than a year of debate over whether a video taken in an Arkansas swamp really does show a surviving member of the species, a team of ornithologists and bird watchers have weighed in with a "devastating" critique.
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"The whole thing is sad," says the team's leader David Sibley, a bird illustrator from Massachusetts. "I wish we were reporting something different. But it is very important for the truth to be out there."
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"The Sibley critique is pretty devastating," says ornithologist Rick Prum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, lead author of the withdrawn manuscript.
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Just read the Science articles (sorry, didn't know where else to put this comment). My impression is that anyone already following the Ivory-billed saga will probably not be swayed either way, or at least the ratio of skeptics versus believers will probably remain the same. My mind wasn't changed, and I've been on the fence for quite some time.
The real unknown is how this will affect the opinion of the general public, or perhaps more accurately, the portion of the general public that gives a flip.
Man, Sibley is good. He shows how a wing that you think is showing the upper side is really showing the underside.
Wouldn't you think that Cornell et al would get Jackson and Sibley to review the data BEFORE they published. What's up with that? Just trying to hog all the glory?
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