Update 1: A University of Windsor press release has been posted here.
An excerpt:
The University of Windsor/Auburn University team recorded 14 sightings of Ivory-Bills and identified more than 300 sounds matching historical recordings and descriptions of the bird. As well, the group found 20 nesting cavities in the appropriate size range for Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, and identified trees bearing the distinctive feeding marks of the long-sought woodpecker. Their findings will appear in the new online journal, Avian Conservation and Ecology - Ecologie et Conservation des Oiseaux.The grapevine says that Hill et al tried to get their stuff published at several other venues, including Nature, but they were turned down.
Update 2: A long article is now available at the Anniston Star. Please read the whole thing.
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A Moustache Can Play the Part
(with apologies to no one)
Tom Wolfe, where have you gone?
We need you more than that bong
You puffed with the Merry Prankster
Our story here is in the dumpster
Unless Gorman finally calls it quits
All we’ll hear is just more of Fitz
You are made of the Right Stuff
And can rescue us from this fluff
The book will be…and this is no tease
Bigger than Bonfire of the Vanities
The movie not a Tom Hanks flop
This story actually has a plot
The rise and fall of American Ornithology
That’s got all the sex of 60’s acid biology
The book and movie will be your fortune
The players are ripe, the time opportune
The character’s parts are off the shelf
Everyone can just play his self
I admit that the part of Ivory Bill
Seems difficult to cast until
You realize it can be a work of art
A moustache can play the part!
Yes, a moustache can play the part!
the distinctive feeding marks of the long-sought woodpecker.
Funny that these "distinctive feeding marks" weren't featured in the 2005 Science article. I don't even recall them being mentioned. Have I forgotten something?
Ok I listened to some of the "kent" calls ... I focused on the ones that they got multiple kents ... seems like if they could record one kent they could record two (or has the bird evolved to kent only once every week)
Does anyone else hear a sandhill crane in this "kent" ...
The carpinterio can't get over how these guys have just done exactly what Cornell did ... stylisticly everything.
Too bad the explorers club has already given out the awards.
Although it had camera equipment, Hill says the team “did not get that clear a picture,” of the bird. “We set out to prove that there are ivory-bills there. In that, we failed. It was a success, however, in that we have evidence.”
But everything is evidence for the possible existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker. There are still swampy areas. There are still trees. And there are similar woodpeckers flying all over those places.
Finding swamps and trees is not "evidence" for a living ivory bill. Nor are holes in trees which are "appropriately sized" for an ivory bill. Other woodpeckers make holes of the "appropriate size". Nor are knocking noises "evidence" when its known that such noises can come from other sources besides the woodpeckers.
As for the calls ...
when you try to match them against the 1935 recording, it isn't exact.” Rosenberg went on to say that birds from different regions can have different dialects and this may account for the slight difference.
This is "evidence"? Non-matching calls are evidence? You see, when you are allowed to fabricate post hoc explanation handy then anything "unexplainable" can be evidence for your claim. Where are the descriptions in the literature of these detectable "dialect differences" between ivory-billed woodpeckers?
[Hill] also added, “I can’t imagine how we could be wrong,” and asked, “What else could be making that noise? Nothing in nature we know of.
So let's get this straight. Nothing in nature sounds like an ivory billed woodpecker, including these calls (which is why the post hoc explanation of a "dialect" is invoked). Therefore ... we think it is an ivory bill woodpecker, a bird that hasn't been seen in 60 years.
“Now our job is to go find what the source of all these knocks, and kent calls and what exactly these big birds are.”
These birds are so big, in fact ... that they can't be photographed. Try to believe that Hill actually said the things that he is quoted as saying.
As ornithologist Geoff Hill tells it, he was a new professor in the mid-1990s at Auburn, laboring under a workload, trying to make tenure, juggling family and job, when one day he received a call from a man in Geneva County, whom he described as some guy in a pickup truck.
The man in the pickup told a skeptical Hill that he had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker; that it was big and it flew away from him into an old growth forest along the Pea River near the city of Geneva in south Alabama.
Ah, yes, the "man in the pickup truck" and his wonderful stories. Real genuine honest American folk, the kind that can spit a watermelon seed and pop the tail of a flatrock rattler from twenty feet. Brings a tear to the eye, don't it?
Don Marley, an aquaculturalist who owns land on the river near the state line and has been in the area for years, says while he has never seen an ivory-bill he isn’t surprised there is evidence of them in the area given the habitat.
“South of Geneva, the river starts spreading out into the bottomlands, into swamp forests,” he said. “If I were to guess where they might be, I would say that they would be in that area.”
Well, that sure is interesting "evidence" isn't it? A guy who lives in the area for "years" and who has never seen one. Hmm. And who "if had to guess" where they might be, he'd guess they'd be where? In the place where he hasn't spent a whole hell of a lot of time. Wow. Convincing stuff, here.
Hicks, now an undergraduate student in Colorado, said he recalled seeing an editorial in The Anniston Star referring to historic reporting sightings south of the city, where the Choctawhatchee and Pea rivers come together. That led him to look at satellite imagery of the area, which he determined to be more conducive to ivory-bills.
Hicks, Hill and assistant Brian Rolek then moved onto the Choctawhatchee.
“Within just an hour or so after we went into that area,” he said by phone from Colorado, “we heard this rapping that was really loud. I can only describe it as like someone beating a baseball bat against a tree. Soon after, Brian saw a large bird that had some interesting markings
Got that? A 23 year old "professional birdwatcher" picks a site from a satellite map and within an hour of arriving at the sight sees an ivory billed woodpecker.
The 23-year-old Hicks, who has been birding since he was 10, is described by Hill as one of the best birders he has ever known.
WOW! I AM SO IMPRESSED!!!!!
He has worked professionally as a bird-watching guide
OMIGOD THIS GUY MUST BE AN INFALLIBLE GENIUS SAVANT!!!
and is studying to be an ornithologist.
Nothing like a motive laid bare for all to see.
and is studying to be an ornithologist
Worth repeating.
“I am as sure that I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker as I am about anything,” he said. “There is no way it could have been anything else.”
And Hicks would know because he had never seen one before. Oh, and he had a great vantage point. He was sitting on a log and he saw the bird "out of the corner of his eye." That is how the professionals do it, I guess.
Mennill, who is a specialist in avian sounds and has studied cousins of the ivory-bill in Central America says, “I have never come across anything like this in the United States. It reminds me of what I have heard in Central America.”
But I thought the sounds were like nothing else in nature ...
Round and round and round we go!
I
I visited the sound page and those double-knock sound files are a laugh and a half.
Yeah -- "nothing in nature" sounds anything like those recordings except an ivory billed woodpecker. Sure. The ivory billed woodpecker is the only thing in nature capable of making two knocking noises, one right after the other.
Right. It's real "distinctive" you see.
http://web2.uwindsor.ca/courses/biology/dmennill/IBWO/DK%202006%2004%2010%200646h.wav
What else could that be except an ivory-billed woodpecker?
Gotta run now. My plane for Lourdes leaves in half hour.
This recording of nine double knocks from a Pale-billed Woodpecker, recorded by Dan Mennill in Costa Rica in May 2006, is an example of another double-knocking woodpecker. Note the difference in tone
Oh yeah. It's as different from every one of those recordings as chocolate ice cream differs from chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that the "tone" of any tool (including a beak) is dependent on what exactly the tool is striking (its humidity, thickness, etc) and the fact that this difference in "tone" is not especially striking, why would anyone be surprised that Central American woodpeckers are not in Florida?
I like the evidence. It has a pleasant Hardy Boys kind of a quality to it.
With CLO I was skeptical on day one, then I switched and spent several months taking CLO at it's word, then I saw the light. So I think it's fair to give these guys a few months.
My analysis by the way should go like this: "The sightings are all flybys at a distance, that alone tells us what we need to know. It's the imagination at work." But a gut instinct won't let me go there yet. Buried among the duds here are some things I can't yet articulate that make this story sound good.
So y'all, until further notice, I'm with the Hardy Boys.
pd
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