You may want to put this in its own post.
Check out this part:
While Collins has been working in the field, two biologists, David Martin and William Pulliam, have been analyzing the data.
(David Martin is Fangsheath - a reptile guy in Texas, and Bill Pulliam is someone in Tennessee)...
Monday, June 05, 2006
Stranger and stranger
A reader sent me this:
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15 comments:
You know, I wondered if this was Collin's own release, he's so pugnacious about his sightings.
This is just a great blog. How many places can you go where you can satisify both your sense of humor and sense of the absurd.
Mike Collins brings the U.S. Navy into the IBWO conflict.
Will he make the Pearl River the Pearl Harbor of this war? Can the secret agent known as Fishcrow fight the rising tide of skeptics. Your freedom to believe anything you want, no matter how irrational, depends on it.
Yes, Fishcrow is the gift that just keeps on giving. If he didn't exist, we'd have to make him up.
The carpinterio is beside himself with the idea the US Navy is now embroiled in this ... the Carpinterio used to feel like he was an insider, but now this has just gone off the rails, first he learns that Buffy the vampire slayer has a tie in, then he learns that the entire 7th fleet is steaming back from the persian gulf ... on because someone named "zickeefoose has ANALYZED the video and found it ponderous and heavy" this has totally eclipsed anything that Fitzcrow could have done. All he managed to get was a gulfstream V, but it looks like Fitzcrow is going to get GWB to put that flight suit back on and do a top gun landing .. how long before Katrina is blamed.
no wait, GWB will do a top gun landing in a Ghillie Suit, recalling the days when no one could locate him in the TANG, and praise the recovery of the IBWO as "mission accomplished" one of the great conservation successes of our day ... Fitzcrow will rue the day the John Bridgeland and all the newley minted Mcleanites came to his party ... formerly it was just reserved for dusty ol'geneticts and hard core lumpers and splitters ...
How much of world history is actually fact and how much is based on Fishcrow type reporting?
This press release is 95% Fishcrow and 5% editing without fact checking.
Simply incredible, that belief is passed on as fact/science.
The same fanatical cadre leading the charge: Fishcrow, Fangsheath, Zickenfoose, et al perpetrate the myths. The press sucks it in.
Methinks the fruit hangs heavy in the verdant fields of this legend! Where does one begin? Is this guy really beting swords into Ghillie Suits? Does he really have anything to do with building actual submarines that they put real people into?
But alas, I really just want to know if Buffy will be in the movie - she may have edged BirdChick out of the lead role - but we'll have to see who gets the callback.
I do hate to dignify it with a response, but if you got to
http://www.fishcrow.com/winter06.html
and watch his clips, you gotta ask....
why do the clips stop after 2ish seconds. The "hitching up the tree" bird is still squarely in the middle of the frame - where is the rest of the film?
Could it be that it morphs into a PIWO!
And someone answer me this:
Why do you zoom OUT?
http://www.fishcrow.com/flight-1.avi
"where's the rest of the film?" "Why does he zoom out?"
You guys have me rolling in the aisles. You are actually asking for logic to be displayed by fishcrow?
What are you guys thinking?
Methinks regrets drifing into logic here - it must be the methadone talking.
Although I really do worry that this guy has anything to do with the building of submarines.
If you have visited Fishcrow you know that his site has a section on "Sports Tape Trading". My concern in trading with him would be that with his video standards he would send me an alleged Super Bowl tape that could just as well be a birthday party for a three-year-old with a finger or food covering half of the lens. I suppose he would then refer me to Zickefoose to have her interpret the game frame by frame.
And that leads me to my current football fantasy that I will carry through at least the next season. I want to see a referee looking at the instant replay monitor, running out into the middle of the field, turning on his microphone as a hush falls over the crowd and sayiing:
"Upon further review the blob is a Pileated Woodpecker. Cornell did not score a touchdown and the extinction clock for Ivory-bille should be reset for 60 years. Skeptics ball!"
For those of you who regularly read the base comedy that is BirdForum, Bill Pulliam is former BF contributor 'Billbill'. I was wondering where he'd gone after he threw his dummy out of the pram during a debate on BF and stopped posting there. Nice to see he isn't wasting his time on anything so frivolous as BF anymore :-)
Hey, Mike Collins' video "evidence" can easily be put to rest by simply viewing the pileated videos that everyone is on about on birdforum. I watched the Piwo video repeatedly on windows media viewer and went frame by frame. When the bird lands in the trees it seems to do what Mike's bird supposedly did,,it plays hide and seek as Collins asserts only IBWO's do. Also if you stop it frame by frame you will see the spectacular thin neck and large head and beak that he asserts id's his bird as an IBWO. Go ahead,,give it a try and you will see,,,Mike Collins' bird is a PIWO.
Sorry for the delay, I only just heard through the grapevine that I had been mentioned here.
My analysis of Mike's data was the discussion of the video and the sonograms of the calls he recorded that I talked about on Birdforum many months ago, before I got tired of the interminable bickering and reputation-trashing (from all sides, and yes I admit to having been a full participant in it, all the more reason to just take a deep breath, turn, and walk away), and withdrew from the public discourse. There's been no great behind-the-scenes show going on; or if there has been I am not privy to it. Dave and I gave Mike our opinions and interpretations immediately following his releasing his recordings, because we had access to spectrographic and image manipulation software that he didn't, and of course we were eager to see what he had and had not managed to actually capture. As far as I am aware it is nothing beyond what we also stated publically way back then. Mike is free to do whatever he likes with his own recordings, as is anyone. If he gave me an acknowledgement in his press release, fine, it is a gratious and appreciated gesture. Unlike some, I'm not especially concerned about "tarnishing my birding reputation" by association with Ivorybill sightings; birding reputations are earned or squandered in the field, not on the internet. Besides, I've been at this a long time, since before there was an internet, or even a home computer, or hell, even telephone Rare Bird Hotlines in most areas. No one is likely to know the real significance of all this until we have a decade of hindsight.
I wasn't able to read the copy of the press release Mike e-mailed me (format issues), but I wasn't especially concerned. It's his sighting to do with as he pleases. If he or anyone else comes up with any more video or sound recordings that they feel might or might not show an IBWO, I'll be perfectly happy to look at them and give my opinion. And if you think I am a mindless, unquestioning believer in any IBWO joker who comes down the pike, I'd suggest you ask Bill Smith a.k.a. That Magic Guy a.k.a. Mad Bill about that one. He's convinced that I am the Antichrist. What I am, perhaps, is more patient than average with and forgiving of the actual efforts of real sub-perfect humans working hard in the field; unless, that is, they seem to be engaged in deliberate hoaxing.
As for what I have been doing, I've been birding, backloading three decades of field notes into e-bird (I got freaked when I saw my hand-written notebooks getting mildew damage and decided I needed an off-site backup record), and throwing out the occasional snide comment on BINAC's site (his blog is FUNNY). Check the TNbirds listserv, if you're curious. The birding universe does not, in fact, revolve exclusively around the Ivorybill.
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