Links related to the 2006 Celebration are here and here.
Wikipedia still says this:
Brinkley, Arkansas hosts the Annual Ivory Billed Woodpecker Celebration, around February every year.(Started in 2006) The Celebration includes Exhibits, birding tours, educational presentations, a vendor market, and more.
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I continue to be amazed that Brinkley, a town of just 3,950 residents in an economically depressed region of Arkansas, has a brand-new convention center that will seat up to 600 people. With no more Ivory-bills around, what are they going to use to entice visitors to town?
Presentations will be offered by those who have actually seen the ivory-bill, including Gene Sparling, Tim Gallagher, David Luneau, and Bobby Harrison...
Please change "have actually seen" to "have claimed to have seen".
This story is just filled with great tidbits!
Tippit called out: "Two white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white."
Is this a joke? That is one of the most lame descriptions of a bird I've ever heard.
Birding is storytelling, and ivory-bill birding is the most exquisitely nuanced yarn of them all.
Well THAT explains a LOT!
The fantastic story of the bird's rediscovery begins with the first confirmed sighting.
Uh, do a bit of research before you write "confirmed".
Jack Hitt is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine was about abortion in El Salvador.
I'm not touching that one with a 10 foot pole.
OK, I know I should stop, but this stuff is just too good, and I'm only half way through the article:
The first sentence of Gallagher's book reads, "I think I've always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which seem to involve birds." This sentiment of deep longing grips all those now on the prowl in Arkansas. "It's been a fixation since early childhood," Fitzpatrick told me. If you accept the thinking of Jackson and Sibley, then it's possible to reread Gallagher's book not as a birder's adventure of discovery but as a fanatic's confession of self-delusion. He sometimes seems to undermine his own claims. Gallagher confesses to be prone, for example, to "quixotic quests." The code name used for the bird during the Inventory Project was "Elvis," an unusual choice given that Elvis is now someone seen by true believers but who is, well, extinct. In Gallagher's book, you can find Harrison's initial reaction to Luneau's video: "It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good."
And this guy is supposed to be an example of the type of reliable and objective observer who has reported seeing the bird?
Make it stop! Is this a SNL skit?
Gallagher also tells the story of a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who had an Arkansas sighting a year before Gene Sparling, the kayaker, and was the first person to alert Gallagher to Sparling's account. Scott is a former lawyer who in midlife took up residence in a yurt near her parents' house in Long Beach, Calif. On one birding expedition, Scott took along a friend who knew an "ivory-bill whisperer." With the clairvoyant on the cellphone, the search party learned that the bird wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group's "energy." Scott eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact, Scott has seen the bird quite a lot, so much so that she is openly scorned by other birders. "I must admit," Gallagher nevertheless writes, "I had come to believe strongly in her sighting."
Trace back the involvement of the Department of the Interior, Cornell University, the Nature Conservancy and a half-dozen other groups on the ground, and you'll find that all of them, arguably, owe their presence in Arkansas to a tent-dwelling courthouse dropout taking her guidance from an ivory-bill whisperer on a cellphone.
Should Brinkley restore its earlier name, Lick Skillet? Maybe we should have a poll.
"Jeepers, is it true that those folks got a new 600 seat auditorium."
According to this link , the Brinkley convention center opened in 1996.
I'm hearing that the event will be moved to Bruce, Florida this year. Other towns interested in sponsoring in outyears have "marketing" crews scouting in East Texas, Southeast Georgia, and along the South Carolina coast.
With a median annual household income of $19,868, at some point the people of Brinkley will feel that they were made to look like fools for buying into the delusions of the people who promised to put their town on the map and then just made it the answer to a birding triva question.
Other towns interested in sponsoring in outyears have "marketing" crews scouting in East Texas, Southeast Georgia, and along the South Carolina coast.
A sort of moving minstrel show. I like that.
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