Review an excerpt from this article (the bold font is mine):
"All woodpeckers bang on trees," he said, but no other makes a double knock like the ivory-billed.... and an excerpt from this article (the bold font is mine):
Hill said it is hard to catch the bird on camera because it hides behind trees when it lands, but it's not impossible. He plans to use time-lapse cameras on future trips. By expanding his team to as many as 14 members and using up to 30 cameras, purchased with state, federal and private funding, he ensures success.
"I saw it and seeing is believing," he said. "We will get a picture of it."
In December, the Windsor-Auburn team plans a major expedition to nail the identification, by training automatic cameras at promising tree cavities, carrying high-quality video gear, using remote listening posts to quickly find Ivory-bill hot spots and dispatching as many as 20 field investigators instead of the lonely two students who camped there this past winter and spring.Time marches on, and now mid-March is only 100 days away.
"All those excuses will be gone," said Geoffrey Hill, the Auburn University ornithologist and bird feather expert who launched the search in May 2005.
At some point relatively soon, even Hill has got to shift his thinking from anticipating success to explaining failure.
If the search fails (as it's virtually certain to do), how will Hill handle it? Will he go with the ever-popular "the birds must have moved or died", or will he go claim that the population of Ivory-bills is still there but he needs another year of funding to get a photograph?
It would be incredibly refreshing if Hill were to just admit that Ivory-bills were probably NOT present in his search area over the last few years.
By the way, it appears that even Cyberthrush is already starting to explain away the upcoming failure of this U.S. search season:
So much habitat in need of searching (maybe 8000-14000 sq. miles)... and yet many are already saying they'll give up on the species if this limited search season goes unsuccessful. Luckily, real field science doesn't operate on arbitrary timetables nor armchair analysis, but depends on those hands-on few willing and able to do the toilsome, on-the-ground work necessary, however long it takes.
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Luckily, real field science doesn't operate on arbitrary timetables nor armchair analysis, but depends on those hands-on few willing and able to do the toilsome, on-the-ground work necessary, however long it takes.
Uh, doesn't "real field science" simply make observations and draw conclusions from them? So if 10 years of searching for IBWOs doesn't turn up any conclusive evidence of one, wouldn't a "real field scientist" draw the conclusion that they are likely extinct?
It sounds like cyberthrush has a predetermined endpoint (i.e. a "hypothesis"), and he feels that real science will get you to that endpoint if you just stick with it long enough. In fact, the scientific method says no such thing.
depends on those hands-on few willing and able to do the toilsome, on-the-ground work necessary, however long it takes.
Squeezing blood out of stone is difficult and time-consuming. There are some, however, that will continue to squeeze until successful.
Thank you.
Luckily, real field science doesn't operate on arbitrary timetables nor armchair analysis,..
Nor does it operate on zealots on life-long quests who tear up at apparent sightings that justify their existence.
And it certainly does have to include some post-field analysis so that instantaneous conclusions made at the moment of observation are subjected to rigorous examination.
Two words.
Don Quixote
Two words.
Don Quixote
One word.
Word.
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