Thursday, March 09, 2006

A search volunteer's web site

A Cornell search team volunteer has put up this web site.

A typical volunteer's day is described here; a helpful reminder on their door is pictured here.
Posted by at 2:11 PM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Let's see that's 34 people searching? Or 34 people with some non-searchers? Only the Big Woods?
34 searching the 250 sq mile Big Woods would come out to 2.5 sq miles a person. Big but doable.
You'd think by now they'd have covered the whole thing a few times over. I don't know the number of transects they would need
if you assume IBWO sounds carry 1/4 mile. Let's say 12+ transects
of 2.5 miles each. That's about
40 miles of tramping around a grid
or using a canoe and porting and
carrying. Maybe 35 miles but I'll assume some careless wandering and
make it 40. Now I don't know if
all 34 people are searching ... if
there are only 20, and assumably
not everyone is a fit, kayak carrying, equipment carrying kind of person and also assume that they
often go out in pairs... then you
could double the search to maybe
80 miles of total walking/kayaking
Now this is just the Big Woods.
Of course Cornell is beating the
Big Woods quite a bit though if there was a nesting IBWO, there's still a good chance they would get lucky. Now I can't speak about
the difficulty of getting around down there with equipment, kayak,
cameras, recorders, lunch etc.
One could make suppositions to support both points of view.
"No way 34 people can't do justice to 250 square miles in several seasons if there is a nesting pair". Or you could imagine the
nesting pair is somehow off-grid and the purported IBWO is a visitor. Then the luck factor of finding a pair wandering into the
Big Woods to feed might require several passes or 80 total miles searched, times a few double and triple searches of a 4 sq mile grid. Remember I doubled the
distance to 80 and maybe these
folks are younger and travel alone
sometimes, so if you want, drop the total to 60 total miles hiking/kayaking/.
Of course Cornell is also still spending some time in the unpromising Cache River area, so that dilutes the search pool somewhat too.
It's not impossible that a given
volunteer would have to cover
their grid several times, so
conservatively double the 80 to
190 or 200 miles per person, assuming no dilution of search pool
by deploying searchers outside the
Big Woods. My whole point isn't
to present sacrosanct numbers here,
just to establish the plausibility of 34 searchers covering 250 square miles. Now the actual
shape of the search area can mean for long skinny areas wilderness areas, that can present special
challenges but also opportunities.
You can attack the math all you want but you'll always come up
with a fair number of searcher-miles in difficult terrain and some degree of repetition in each search grid. And believers will
always wonder if all the other
wilderness areas in the South are getting a fair shake while the Big Woods gets combed relentlessly.
Skeptics will say no way a resident IBWO pair could escape 34+ searchers who have 120 days (assume no rain days) to travel
about 120 miles a person.
The skeptics might be right about
that... are they just incredibly
unlucky? Perhaps someone will
link in Tom's transect math
post from some months back.
I'm just searching for the truth
... the plausibility of a rare
bird that actually lives in the Big Woods escaping a good photo.
Or a good new audio recording.
When you add ARUs, it does become
harder to believe in a resident bird.

Paul Sutera, New Paltz, NY.

7:51 AM, March 10, 2006

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