Report on Hill/Mennill talk at Veracruz

Anonymous writes:

I was just at the talk by Hill and Menill, and have prepped a few notes for your interest and/or website. I am a slow typist (but fortunately a fast note taker) so have largely kept it simple. Statements in inverted commas are all quotes from the talk, unaltered and verbatim. Do with it what you will.

Basically they presented exactly the same info that is on their websites, but some of the context and quotes were interesting...

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Hill and Menill
Weds, October 4th, 2006 (1245-1345)
Ulua 5, World Trade Center, Veracruz, Mexico
“Evidence that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers persist on Florida”

Hill mainly spoke, for a little over 30 minutes, including a short segment by Menill on the microphone work

Hill describing 21st May 2005
“I had never looked for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers until the weekend we found them”
“We wanted to get out and kick around”
“Brian got a clear look at an Ivory-billed that day”

Observations
Described Tyler Hicks as someone who “leads bird tours and runs identification seminars” [is this true?] and later as an “expert in bird identification”.
“There are no puddle ducks in the forest”
Even in their 1 mile x 2 mile (500ha) study area, they were “totally overwhelmed” by the area they had to cover.
The observations were “mostly Brian searching on his own”
There are “two birds, and I would claim three birds”

Listening stations
“difficult to estimate how much area each microphone picks up”
They played seven of the 99 double-knock recordings, and six individual and two multiple kent calls, all of which are on the web,

Cavities
They measured 131 in the 500ha study area
“many are Pileated cavities, maybe most of them”
They have only got up to three of them so far, and found one of them to be three feet deep, and completely clean.

Bark adhesion
this is the “weakest evidence, but some people like this”
“bark scaling is actually on cavity trees often”

A variety of issues came up during a fairly lengthy Q&A session after the presentation, although all questions were quite innocuous. One questioner asked if the kent calls could be from Blue Jays, and Hill responded that he had personally never heard Blue Jays make such a call. He pointed out that Blue Jays do not occur at their site in winter, and that they have recordings of kent calls with no other Blue Jay calls for at least a month either side.

Hill described the evidence as “compelling” and “highly suggestive”. They recognized that they needed proof however, and emphasized that in capitals, literally. That proof would be a “definitive image” and Hill said that would be “our only focus until we get that”. They described an intensive search and covering the area with cameras, saying that [whatever was making the scaling and cavities] “we’ll get pictures of it for sure”.

When asked about amateur sightings in the area, Hill stated that “a lot of people don’t understand rural Florida”.

Regarding the abundance of Pileateds at the site, he said among those people who had been there, the “consensus was Pileated Woodpeckers aren’t particularly abundant”.

On the subject of the birds’ behaviour when seen, “they are shy…..not in a panic to get away from people”, and when seen “with very few exceptions, these things are flying away from us”.

On a question of comparing the Florida calls with CLO recordings, and the Kellogg recordings, Menill said that the “frequency characteristics match up well”, but then also said that they have found about “a 110 millisecond delay between the first and second knocks” which was “longer than any other Campephilus” and that they would continue to research this on Pale-billed Woodpeckers in Costa Rica.

Most of their funding will come from a private source, a billionaire by the name of M C Davis, who ahs a foundation that I didn’t quite catch the name of (Nagoosy?).