Here.
The article suggests that skeptics believe the Luneau bird is an "abnormal pileated woodpecker". Personally, since late August 2005, I've said that the Luneau bird is likely to be a normal Pileated Woodpecker. This post (about Cornell misinterpreting out-of-focus vegetation as a perched Ivory-bill) came a few days later.
You may remember Zimmer from this posting last month. Note some good comments on Zimmer's own blog posting here.
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3 comments:
Since you pointed out the error of the "abnormal pileated", I have to comment on your quote:
"It's nonsense," Nelson said of the Florida reports. "They looked for a conspicuous, noisy diurnal bird for 16 months in a 2-square-mile area, yet never got a good look at a perched bird and never found so much as a feather."
It sounds like they actually on searched for about 5-7 months. The Auburn website says there was a sighting May 21 2005, and then they returned a week later. They returned in late July, after which they planned a winter search mid-Dec to end of April. They mention that 9 of 14 having sightings through July 2006, but there's no indication of the amount of search effort after April.
So the search wasn't 16 months. Sounds more like 5, but I'll be generous and call it 6 or 7. Still plenty of time to find an Ivory-billed, you'd think, but what's up with only searching two square miles? Tanner estimated maximum densities of 1 pair per 6 square miles, though it was one pair per 17 square miles at the Singer Tract in 1934 (but he also mentions birds ranging over 3-4 square miles in the breeding season).
They must have just been in the wrong 2 square miles. Obviously they just weren't searching a large enough area, right?
Right. So if you've been birding since 1976, you can't say you've been birding "for 30 years."
No, you add up all the actual birding hours during that time. So when people ask, you need to say, "I've been birding for 2 months."
"The skepticism about the ivory-bill rediscovery doesn't bother me," he said. "We've all been told for our entire lives that these birds are extinct, so naturally it's a difficult pill to swallow when someone comes along and claims to have found one."
Oh, the eternal whine of the paradigm shifter.
Fight the dogma, Tim! Fight the dogma!
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