The Habitat Quest

Laura Erickson has posted some photos from her Ivory-billed Woodpecker Habitat Quest here.

In my humble opinion, she's going to find some large individual trees, but in the end, an honest assessment won't differ much from Jerome Jackson's late '80s impression:

Superficial examination of habitats revealed few areas of extensive, mature bottomland hardwoods, and I discontinued my efforts in the state.

Check out in particular this picture, taken where "David Luneau's sister-in-law Joan spotted an Ivory-billed Woodpecker on September 4, 2004". The spot looks like the boat landing near the busy Highway 17 bridge. Doesn't that area seem quite accessible?

Nothing against Joan, but it seems to me that we're simultaneously being told:

a) that we've got no photos in 60+ years because the birds live way back in remote swamps where birders never visit, and

b) however, birders do occasionally see Ivory-bills in quite accessible places

I'm afraid that it's likely that both a) and b) are false.

What's with the Google ads?

You may have noticed that when you search for something like "ivory-billed woodpecker" on Google, you sometimes see a sponsored link for my blog. Is this proof that my Ivory-bill writing is actually sponsored by some sort of Evil Arkansas Duck Hunting Cabal?

Sorry, no. No one has ever paid me a dime. I'm paying for those ads out of my own pocket. I think of it this way: for the price of one round-trip flight to Arkansas, I can buy a whole lot of hits from Google, because they're dirt cheap. I believe this is an important issue, and I firmly believe that my facts and logic are correct. I do spend considerable time on my writing, and it's worthwhile to me to spend a few bucks to reach a wider audience.

(To me, it's especially heartwarming to look at my sitemeter and see where a sponsored click has resulted in someone spending over an hour on the blog, maybe generating 50 or more page views.)

The percentage of "paid" traffic to this blog is becoming less and less significant. As it becomes easier to find this blog (through natural, "unpaid" search) etc, I may well drop the ads.

A related question is: Are you doing this all just to promote yourself? Again, the answer is no. I'm not doing this for the publicity; I'm doing it despite the publicity.

As a result of my stand on this issue, I have faced a quite astonishing amount of profanity-laced invective and ridicule. My stand is costing me money, it's costing me time, and it's causing people to publicly say terrible things about me; however, I'm not backing down, because I'm speaking the truth as I know it.

Too much emphasis on fieldmarks?

Ok, so there's this Bill from Hohenwald, TN who posted some critical comments on this blog recently. Bill said "Your points have been made and heard already by all who will listen" (I'm not sure how he knows that); he implied that I should cease and desist until the end of this search season, when we will have more to talk about. Fair enough.

Coincidentally, there's also a Bill from Hohenwald, TN who is evidently a strong believer, and over on BirdForum, that Bill thinks we have plenty to talk about right now; he's currently churning out more posts per day than I am. That Bill is emphatically advancing some groundbreaking new "believer" points, as in this posting about "jizz":

Jizz is the secret ingredient (or maybe the 800 pound gorilla in the room) in Ivorybill sightings...And this is why I am convinced by the Bayou de View sightings and video. When I finally got that video to download and play on my computer I practically jumped up and started dancing and hollering "YEE HAW!!! No $@$%#@ way that bird is a %#%^$ Pileated!!!!!" It's all in the jizz, and that jizz is NO Pileated, not even remotely. If that is a pileated then my chickens are tinamous. You can holler yourself horse about upperwings and underwings and leading edges and trailing edges and halo effects if you like, bury your head looking for the Field Marks (tm), meanwhile missing the sledgehammer of jizz trying to get your attention by pounding on your head with sirens wailing and big flashing neon letters declaring "IVORYBILL IVORYBILL IVORIBILL!!!!!!!"

Questions for either one of the Bills:

1. If the Luneau bird's jizz eliminates Pileated for you so obviously and completely, then why didn't it have the same effect on folks like David Luneau, Martjan Lammertink, David Sibley, Jerome Jackson, Richard Prum, Mark Robbins, and Michael Patten?

2. Aren't "jizz-based" identifications more properly restricted to those cases where observers have considerable field experience with both species that you are trying to separate, or for cases where known species are present for direct comparison of size, shape, flight style, etc?

If an observer has never personally seen a presumed extinct bird, and further has never even seen a video of that bird in flight, doesn't that put a significant crimp in that person's ability to reliably identify that bird in flight via jizz?

3. If we had some modern photos like this, would you still be arguing the relative value of jizz over fieldmarks?

Is this a photo of an Ivory-bill?

There's been some recent, serious Internet discussion of the photo available at this web page.

It's drawn some hopeful comments from "believers" such as "...there is a strong indication of a light-colored area along the lower part of the wing" and "...it doesn't look like a pileated, something about the shape both of the crest and of the bird itself."

Do you find that photo at all convincing?

If not, can I safely infer that you "have an agenda", that you've never actually birded in the field, that you quite probably loathe puppies and small children, etc etc? ;^)

(If I right-click on that photo and look at "Properties", I see that it is less than 6k in size. I'm told that to reach this tiny size, you'd likely have to dramatically degrade any original photo, whether it's digital or a scan of a paper photo.)

Nova scienceNOW website

There's an interesting Ivory-bill section on the Nova scienceNOW website here.

Near the top of the page, it says "An enchanting bird believed extinct mysteriously reappears ... maybe."

It looks like you'll be able to view their Ivory-bill segment online there on January 11. There's also a discussion board and an "Ask the Expert" section where you can submit questions for John Fitzpatrick.

The unreliability of fleeting glimpses

Any honest birder will admit that fleeting glimpses, lousy looks, and wishful thinking too often lead to identification errors.

On one memorable occasion, I happened to be standing next to a very well-known Minnesota birder--this is a guy with decades of field experience, a guy who has written extensively on bird identification, a guy who is thanked by name in numerous bird books. As a distant falcon approached, he dramatically shouted "PEREGRINE!! PEREGRINE!!" and pointed in the bird's direction, for the benefit of the stragglers of the birding group he was leading. Shortly afterward, as the approaching bird allowed a better look, he sheepishly shouted (less loudly) something along the lines of "never mind, um, it's only a kestrel".

No birder who's ever lived is immune to such mistakes, and of course, I certainly am not immune. As I've written here previously, I once mistook distant black dots as wolves, when in fact they were ravens.

My point is that given a decent look, a birding expert can tell a peregrine from a kestrel with 100% certainty, and I can very reliably distinguish a raven from a wolf. Give us a fleeting glimpse or a lousy look, however, and the probability of error skyrockets.

The ever-expanding home range

In the ongoing quest to explain why we can't photograph an Ivory-bill, here's another speculation, based on a sample size of exactly zero confirmed birds:

...it is also possible that Tim Barksdale is right, and that these birds today have home ranges measured not in tens or hundreds of square miles, but thousands!

Contrast the above with what Allen and Kellogg published in The Auk in 1937, based on years of real Ivory-bill data from multiple states:

...the birds are non-migratory and moreover they are probably sedentary. It is our belief that most individuals spend their entire lives within a few miles of the place where they are hatched and develop little Ivorybill communities.

Uncertainty at 'Science'

It looks like they're still "believers", but according to this, Science is no longer completely sure about the Ivory-bill "rediscovery" (this time, the bold font is theirs, but the italics are mine):

Bird to watch for. Early in 2005, a blurry video and new sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, considered extinct for the past 60 years, wowed conservationists and birders alike. Some skeptics remained unconvinced by the 1.2-second footage, but many later were swayed by audio tapes of the woodpecker's call and distinctive "tap, tap." Biologists are scouring the Arkansas bayou, where there have now been more than a dozen sightings, for more evidence that they are not seeing a ghost of a bird past. We're betting this "ghost" proves to be the real thing.

I wouldn't say that "many" of the skeptics were swayed by the audio. I know of only two that professed to be swayed (Prum and Robbins), and even those two seem to be back in the skeptic camp now.

At the Science link far above, this caption is next to a frame from the Luneau video:

Now you see it? A fleeting glimpse captured on video raised hopes that the ivory-billed woodpecker might not be extinct after all.