Struggling on a shoestring budget and battling alligators and water moccasin snakes, the team also recorded hundreds of distinctive vocal calls and rapping used by the woodpeckers to communicate, found a score of recent tree-nesting cavities of the right size and identified dozens of the bird's unique chisel marks on bark.2. From the Cornell Daily Sun:
"I think they're all up and down the river," said University of Windsor professor Dan Mennill, a 32-year-old biologist specializing in bird sounds and team co-leader.
“This was not a good year for sightings,” Swarthout said. The Lab of Ornithology has different plans for its ivory-billed searching next year. Swarthout said that the searching this season, which will run from Dec. 4 to the end of April 2007, will be smaller than last year’s. There will be four full-time staffers for Cornell’s search in Arkansas, two technicians and another team member, as well as six to ten volunteers. The past search season had 22 full-time staffers, 112 volunteers and 10 agency/NGO personnel.3. In the fledgling "Avian Conservation and Ecology", where Hill et al's "publication" will appear, this Ivory-bill essay appears in Volume 1, Number 1.
What accounts for this difference? Money, according to Prof. Kenneth Rosenberg, ornithology.
“Since we haven’t come up with a bird or a nest, the number of donations we’ve received are reduced,” he said.
However, researchers are still holding out for an ivory-billed sighting. Prof. John Fitzpatrick, ornithology, believes that “this year we’re armed with two and a half years worth of experience. We can target things much better than before – we can target areas we haven’t looked at before and search again areas in which we’re most likely to find an ivory-billed.”
Rosenberg added that this year’s searchers will have to be “more efficient, given the reduced chances of seeing something due to the smaller search team.”
Note that one of the authors is Jeffrey R. Walters, one of the peer reviewers of Cornell's original 2005 Ivory-bill paper. More on Walters is here.
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2 comments:
It should be easy for them to increase their efficiency since their 2006 success rate was 0%.
found a score of recent tree-nesting cavities of the right size and identified dozens of the bird's unique chisel marks on bark
I grant that this is a news story and journalisming is really hard but can someone tell me when it was first established that the ivory billed woodpeckers "chisel marks" are unique as that term is commonly understood?
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