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17 comments:
Cornell states that "Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are very elusive." Martin Hagne will present "IBWO Times in Arkansas" at the upcoming Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, and their brouchure appropriately describes the species as "illusive"!
"sightings are always difficult to assess"
This is complete BS. Shame on the CLO for making such an absurd statement. Is this 1906 or 2006? In this day and age sight records of birds are routinely documented in exhaustive detail, with detailed sketches showing features that actually could have been seen, reference to technical details(feather tracts, moult, etc.) and relevant papers on identification, along with full discussion of multiple fieldmarks.
"Ivory-billed woodpeckers are very elusive"
More shameless BS. Campephilus woodpeckers do not fall into the category of birds that are genuinely very difficult to see in forests (cloud forest tapaculos) or to photograph because they roam over large areas (Neotropical montane swifts).
Some of the excavations also appear to be reasonably fresh, which makes them even more interesting.
Then climb up the goddamn trees, take a few hundred samples, and run some PCR reactions on them to see if you can detect IBWO DNA.
What's the problem? I assume there is IBWO reference tissue somewhere so the relevant primers can be made.
If the argument is that it is a waste of time to bother with trying to prove that the IBWO is alive, then I wholeheartedly agree.
But that doesn't seem to be the argument that Hill et al are making. Their argument seems to be, "You're gullible, and we're stupid, so let's all take each other for a ride."
The team in Florida has also found bark stripped off trees in ways that are inconsistent with what we would expect from Pileated Woodpeckers.
Can anyone show me where a clear hypothesis was made BEFORE the data was collected as to what sort of bark stripping would be "consistent" with Pileated Woodpeckers? And, if so, can someone tell me what research that hypothesis was based on?
Don't worry. I'm not holding my breath waiting for these kindergarten scientists to come clean.
‘We’re especially interested in the clusters of double knocks and kent-like vocalizations detected in specific areas within relatively brief time periods’
OK, forget the source of the quote...
Before making anymore guesses about where these sounds come from I really suggest you take a look at the chronology of these “cluster” (sort’a cool and crop circle-like I guess). They immediately rule out: Wind and its effects, random falling branches, animals moving through vegetation, human activity, (manholes, shotguns, engine backfires, canoe paddles, screen doors, windmills, pile drivers, etc.). Stationary objects in general are out, as well as beaver tails, and duck wings. If you think any of these hold water, you haven’t yet looked at what they’ve got.
Incidentally, I’m guessing the blue jay thing won’t gain traction for some obvious reasons. And as for sandhills, I’m still waiting patiently for a local to comment on their experiences with the deep woods vocalizations of the majestic panhandle sandhill.
Sorry to rouse ya’ll from your slumbers, but my esteemed skeptic colleagues should be able to come up with guesses better than the ones above.
pd
I'm currently reading Jerry Jackson's IBWO book, and I just read that IBWO was pretty fastidious in cleaing it's nest cavity. No egg shells and very little fecal material, or feathers were found. Again, why do we need DNA, shouldn't we be able to see and photograph this 'elusive bird'?
"I’m still waiting patiently for a local to comment on their experiences with the deep woods vocalizations of the majestic panhandle sandhill."
Gee, Pd, you think they might be flying overhead. Like they do in every other part of the south. I don't think anyone ever said that they get to the Choctowahchiehichityweeki and then walk through the swamp.
my esteemed skeptic colleagues should be able to come up with guesses better than the ones above.
Why? Because you say -- without providing any explanation whatsoever -- that the "chronology" of the sounds rules everything out except for a Some Mysterious Creature?
Give us a break, pd.
And please don't forget to set aside a portion of your income this month for you-know-what.
"Gee, Pd, you think they might be flying overhead. Like they do in every other part of the south?"
Every other part of the south, huh?
Well,good point. It's a migrating sandhill. It spends 2 hours circling and calling equidistant from one ALS while it evades other devices 500 yards away. Then it comes back the same time the next day and does the same thing.
Ten points for trying. I'll file it under "strong hypothesis".
pd
"Then it comes back the same time the next day and does the same thing."
Straw dog, Pd, straw dog. All your arguments are straw dogs. Carpenterio is right about at least one of them could very well be Sand Hill Cranes. Why do you distort his point?
The more interesting point is we again have a Professor of Ornithology, like Fitzcrow, who isn't a very good birder. And who relies on a person they trust in the field.
I never remember any professor of mine that would have followed me off a cliff!
But however we all believe, Fitzcrow got a gift from god in these blokes at Auburn. A true gift from god.
Pd? You promised us good arguments. Give us some good arguments.
You can't just make up things. Now come on give us something to debate. Something that supports the Auburn case.
We realize that you probably can't. But you promised us that!
After a quick look at the "appendix1.pdf" file that has the pretty blue and red double-knockies and kents I noticed a couple of things. First, the scales of the diagrams are not the same. The increments vary from 10 minutes to 1 hour. Even if they aren't close together temporally, they sure look close together when a larger scale is used. Nothing nasty about that, but it's easily misinterpreted at first glance.
From what I can gather from the graphs (too tired to read the data in the tables, and by "tired" I mean "buzzed") the closest kent and double-knocky pair is about 8 minutes apart - chart "D". And they were from different listening stations. (Is there a map somewhere of how the listening station were arranged? Saying they were 500 meters apart doesn't help much unless we know they were in a straight line.)
So, a kent and a knock were heard 8 minutes apart, maybe 1000 meters from each other, maybe more, maybe less. Where is the evidence that these were made by the same animal? If they were 10 seconds apart and from the same recording unit, you could make that argument. Oh, and I'm guessing the kent didn't really sound like the recording we have of an IBWO.
For all we know, one of the researchers got fed up and banged his head aginst the tree, while the other one farted or sneezed 1000 meters (or more, or less) away.
So, to answer your question pd, the double-knocks were probably from some woodpecker and the kent was from something else that makes a kent sound. I'm sorry, I keep saying "kents" when what I really mean is "kent-like vocalizations" (though don't we assume quite a bit when we call them "vocalizations", when they might be "flatulations" or something with a non-vocal cause?). And by "kent-like" I mean "not really like a kent, but close enough when you really want it to be". Know what I mean?
Folks, including whoever wrote the Q & A for the Lab, shouldn't miss Mark Twain's "What stumped the blue jays" posted by anonymous here. Brilliant anon'! (Twain's whole story is here.) "Well, I never struck no such a hole as this before; I'm of the opinion it's a totally new kind of a hole." So the jays commence to stuffin' acorns into a hole with no end in sight. Does this sound familiar? When exhausted, "They all examined the hole, they all made the sufferer tell it over again, then they all discussed it, and got off as many leather-headed opinions about it as an average crowd of humans could have done." Finally, and this will please anonymous who gives Hill et al. three years to find ivory-bills, the story ends with "They brought jays here from all over the United States to look down that hole, every summer for three years."
What the Florida research offers would have been interesting if there really were ivory-bills in Arkansas. The way I see it, Hill et al.'s ideas are not even wrong. I mean what they report in the way of cavities, peelings, and sounds are based on nothing verified or substantiated. It all sounds "good" in light of speculation from Arkansas, but nothing they offer is really known. We can't even say they're wrong. Like the blue jays, everyone's just stuffin' acorns into an assumption, and no amount of retroactive statistical comparisons will ever replace actually verifying in the field what creatures, or combination of creatures, left these signs. Hill et al. fell back on the "aggregate of evidence" idea that Cornell tried to feed us. This works if we *know* at least some parts are true, but when it's all uncertain, it's just a feel-good story that is supposition piled on top of conjecture helped along by self-deception and built on the foundation of questionable claims from Arkansas, which provided inspiriation to Hill and gang, aka the Hardy Boys, when they set out to find ivory-bills on the Choctawhatchee. It's a story that sounds good because a lot of people want it to be true; the social impetus is overwhelming. I hope when they all find out it's nothing but an empty cabin that they do laugh and just admit they might have been wrong. They'd all be welcome over to my cabin, no hard feelings.
Thanks Andrew, for surpassing your peers in upholding the skeptic tradition. I agree that there is little to establish that toots and taps have the same source. They seem to be distinct activities, and may have distinct sources.
Taps often start at or a bit before sunrise. Toots start after sunrise. Both end well before sunset. Both are somewhat episodic, toots more so.
I will add "undefined flatuations" to the strong hypothesis list. And while I'm feeling generous, I will as suggested grant sandhill status to one toot.
pd
There you go, Pd. You're a Skeptic once again. Welcome back to the fold.
This quote from the Cornell Q and A
"The double-knock recordings sound like double knocks made by Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.... But since there are no known recordings of the ivory-bill double knock, we don’t know exactly what they sound like."
Pretty much sums up this whole fiasco. I guess now they're trying "half-honesty" as the best policy.
Anonymous wrote:
"I don't think anyone ever said that they get to the Choctowahchiehichityweeki and then walk through the swamp."
Actually, it's now officially the "Chockfullaibwoachee"
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