An excerpt:
Dr. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell lab, who had consulted with Dr. Hill about the findings before publication, said, “They’ve got a lot of intriguing evidence.”
“This is a perfect illustration of the fact that we need to get a multigroup multistate, comprehensive range-wide search for this bird undertaken,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
David Sibley, author of “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” a critic of the report on the Arkansas bird, called the Florida report “intriguing”, but said it “really provides very little evidence for the existence of Ivory-bills there.”
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8 comments:
America's very own Lord God Bird and they had to go to Canada to get it published?
Say it ain't so, Auburn!
"The mistake,” Dr Hill added dryly, “was ever looking for them.”
NO. The mistake was not having the video on. What were you thinking? Where have you been? You left this to grad. students with no video cams?
Have American ornithologists become completely incompetent?
If this story doesn't interest Tom Wolfe, then he must be dead.
Does any body know if Tom Wolfe died? I may have missed the NY Times obit.
“This is a perfect illustration of the fact that we need to get a multigroup multistate, comprehensive range-wide search for this bird undertaken,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
I'd be all for that if (1) the time frame is limited to one year and (2) failure to produce verifiable documentation of a living ivory billed woodpecker leads to an official pronouncement by all involved faculty and self-proclaimed "experts" that the bird is extinct and ornithologists should be focus their attention on living birds and their habitats.
But that's never going to happen.
So what is the purpose of Dr. Fitzpatrick's proposed "search"?
[Dr. Hill] said he knew how heated the subject of ivory bills had become, but asked, “Once we found them, what was I supposed to do?”
$1000 says you haven't found a single living ivory billed woodpecker, Dr. Hill, and you won't have proved your alleged finding a year from today.
Tom,
Here's the Mennill posting.
http://web2.uwindsor.ca/courses/bio
logy/dmennill/IBWO/IBWOindex.php
Here's what I find "intriguing": A Red State biology department headed by a "Doctor" has emerged as a competitor to CLO for the IBWO grant money diverted from other research and conservation projects, and next January a Democrat will in all likelihood replace the Republican governor of New York, which already has two Democrat US Senators. While I doubt that claims of IBWO by Auburn University prior to the 2005 press conference would have generated any greater interest than those by LSU, now that Cornell has established official federal policy that the IBWO still exists, Auburn is well situated to replace Cornell as the center of Ivorybill spending. Once they're firmly on the federal tit, it will be nearly impossible to dislodge them, and the Ivorybill search will become perpetual regardless of results.
For a report of a possibly extinct bird worth spending some money to investigate, see Possible White-eyed River-Martin in Cambodia.
John Wall
WorldTwitch - Finding Rare Birds Around the World
And there are so very many other stunning birds worth protecting before they become possibly extinct, for example the Banded and Sumatran Ground-Cuckoos (see links to recent photos on worldtwitch). These birds are every bit as magnificent as was the IBWO and being extant are far more deserving of our attention and funding.
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