At present, our best tangible evidence for the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River is recordings of double knocks and kent calls.It could then be argued that Table S3 in Appendix 1 of their paper is pretty critical, since it lists the dates and times of all their recorded putative kent calls and double-knocks.
If you take a look at that table, please see the last column on page 6. The last 23 entries are dated in the years 2007 through 2017.
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9 comments:
Alien are you messin' with us? Have you given the Hill of Beans crew time travel technology?
Sweet Jesus!
As recently evidenced by many excellent posts and responses, circumstances have made it much too easy to be a skeptic. The field is just too crowded. So I have officially appointed myself: Public Defender to the Hardy Boys. I’m sure it will be a thankless job earning nothing but scorn. Should be fun (too bad they can’t afford someone more qualified). Just to be clear, here is the position I’ll work from:
1) There have been countless IBWO sighting in the past sixty years, some more infamous than others, but none upon follow-up have produced credible evidence to support them.
2) Only the Choctawhatchee sightings have generated credible supporting evidence. That evidence is both plentiful and compelling (ok, compelling is a stretch).
3) The actual status of IBWO remains unknown. Definitive claims of it survival, and definitive claims of its extinction, are both articles of faith… and as such both merit a skeptical response.
4) The Choctawatchee evidence is best explained by IBWO. Proof however, will come with a photo.
Doing my bit to move the discussion forward, I’ve provided Tom with a graphical chronology of the reported evidence. If he chooses he can post it. It might generate some interesting discussion.
technical note: my chronology includes PAST events only. It seemed prudent to leave out FUTURE events until they actually occur.
Respectfully,
pd
(public defender)
Nah...Pd...we don't need no stinkin' timeline. Tom already well document that.
And your first 3 point have already been debunked on here. And your 4th is obvious to the point of inanity.
What we need in someone to head over to the site. Do their own scouting. Take a laptop. Make some reports from the field. Or the nearest coffe shop, at least.
Get some pics of these Auburn boys in their Ghillies. Find out what's making the Kents and Double knockies.
Pd, we can't just keep bouncing the rubble because you ask us to. No, you got to provide something unique for us to get excited about.
Go get'em boy!
Hardy boy guy:
Point 2 is wrong because none of the post-1944 IBWO evidence is credible. Please read previous postings to this blog!
Point 4 is not obvious and is in fact completely wrong too. The Florida sightings are best explained as Pileated and perhaps Anhinga. The sounds are Blue Jays, Sandhill Cranes, and god knows what else.
Oops, your right IBWO Aetheist,
I meant to say...and your first half of number 4 is stupid and the last half is obvious to the point of inanity but will never happen.
Whew...glad to get that out of the way.
Now, get out there Pd and gets those kents and double knockies and don't come back until you do.
Only the Choctawhatchee sightings have generated credible supporting evidence.
LOL!
Three words: one thousand dollars.
Has anyone considered emailing any of the researchers and asking some questions? Ex: if you think it's possible that they mistook anhingas for woodpeckers, and heard blue jays or cranes (not woodpeckers), why not ask them why they think otherwise? They must have some semi-logical reason why they've ruled out those possibilities, no? They may be overly optimistic, but I don't think that we can dismiss all of their birding experience just because their claim seems spectacular. Again... just a thought.
The sight records should be evaluated based on critical examination of the field notes and sketches submitted, not by uncritically accepting Tyler Hicks' status as a bird identification expert. If we do consider experience to be a very important factor then it is best to disregard all records by Brian Rolek. Given the admitted inexperience of the latter, the brevity of most sightings, the high expectations of seeing IBWO, the lack of optics, and the nature of the sketches it seems possible that some of the sightings were not even of woodpeckers.
Regarding the sound records, I am very curious to know the previous track record of these folks. For example, have identifications for Neotropical bird species posted by Dan Mennill in the past been verified? Are these guys demonstrably expert in bird ID?
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