Despite years of study, Harrison and Gallagher didn’t recognize the rare bird at first. But as it flew closer, they saw its distinct markings, including a tell-tale flash of white on a secondary wing.
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Harrison has since seen an ivory-billed woodpecker five times. He doesn’t know if some of those sightings were of the same bird, but he did see a female and a male.
According to Ron Rohrbaugh, director of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Research Project, the search team uses a well-defined system for ranking any possible encounters. He says the latest visual encounters all rank in the lowest classification. "They’re all number ones. That means that no more than one field mark was observed, and it was observed by just one person,” he said. Although the visual and audio encounters may not constitute new confirmation of the presence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Rohrbaugh agrees with Lammertink that these encounters keep the crew energized and the morale high.Note that as of today, two full years have passed since Gene Sparling's claimed February 11, 2004 sighting. After a monumental amount of intense searching, not a single bit of evidence rises above the "false positive" noise that should be fully expected.
Searchers combing the Big Woods of Eastern Arkansas for ivory-billed woodpeckers have encountered plenty of “teasers” but so far have failed to snap a picture or new video evidence, a key member of the search team said Tuesday...Seven possible sightings were documented from Nov. 8 to Feb. 3, Lammertink said. None is on par with the seven sightings documented in a peer-review article in Science last year, he said...“We didn’t want to go out there and just document the bird again — we feel like we did that with the video,” said Elliot Swarthout...Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at Cornell University’s ornithology laboratory, said Tuesday that the lab would post an analysis of the Luneau video online today [Wednesday]...The analysis should be posted at www.ivorybill.org this afternoon, he said.
I attended the talk that Bobby Harrison gave at the Museum of Natural Sciences Saturday night. I enjoyed the talk and the history of the ivorybill search that Harrison outlined. Harrison is an entertaining speaker who has devoted much personal time and energy to the ivorybill quest. During the Q&A after the talk, someone in the audience asked Harrison about the essay written by Dr. Jerome Jackson that appeared in the Jan. issue of The Auk. As many of you know, Jackson is a well-respected ornithologist and an authority on Ivory-bills, having spearheaded search efforts in the 1980s. I found Harrison's response to the question disturbing. Without addressing any of Jackson's legitimate and insightful points, Harrison simply dismissed the letter with the remark that Dr. Jackson was just exhibiting 'sour grapes'. I wish I had stood up and said something at that point. Dr. Jackson's letter points out some legitimate questions about the process in which the evidence was rushed to publication and questions the flimsy physical evidence presented by Cornell in their paper. To just say that Dr. Jackson has sour grapes is in my mind unfair to Dr. Jackson, a well-respected ornithologist, is irresponsible, and just plain wrong.
...But as always there’s danger as well. A Sharp-shinned Hawk stoops on an unwary Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that screeches away just in time. A Red-Tailed Hawk peers into a roost hole in a dead tupelo from a perch nearby, and every evening Barred Owls eight-hoot in the darkening bayou. And then there’s the rarest of all possible residents of the Big Woods: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, maybe the rarest bird in the world. Does it still survive in woodpecker heaven or are the dangers too great?I think it's nearly certain that this year's search will once again end without definitive Ivory-bill proof. As this becomes more clear, I anticipate increased speculation that the 2004 Ivory-bill(s) have died or moved away.
We were urged to try and practice our videography on the bounding flybys of woodpeckers, and to note any abnormal white plumage on this species. Of all the looks at these beautiful Pileated Woodpeckers that I had, my tape caught mostly blurs, and all were of standard plumage, white underwing patches and not much white on the top of the wing.The above words may provide some critical insight into the mindset of the search team. If the modern Ivory-bill is viewed as a will-o'-the-wisp that can only be seen as a brief flyby, then maybe our lack of clear photographic proof can be rationalized.
And there was a great mid-weekend birthday party at the duck club with plenty of food, drink, taxidermy, and tall tales of sightings around the campfire.Tall tales of sightings?
The analysis of that [Luneau] video has been very thorough, both by the folks at Cornell and by several others, at least a dozen scientists now, and only Cornell confirms that the Ivory-bill is there, based on that video. I don't believe that it's an Ivory-billed woodpecker, and others don't believe that it's an Ivory-billed woodpecker.
The Arkansas IBWO claim only became a national event because of Cornell's involvement. Stringers see IBWO regularly somewhere within its historic range, but since they invariably lack documentation, their claims are routinely rejected. The sightings in this case are no different.
Furthermore, had the video simply been played at the AOU convention, it would have been hooted away like the photos produced by Lowery. But, after more than a year of secrecy, the video was produced along with a peer-reviewed paper, an elaborate analysis purporting to show that the bird photographed could only be an Ivorybill, and a long list of sight and sound records by people with degrees in biology. Since the search had been suppressed, birders without a conflict of interest had no opportunity to look for the bird until after publication, and then the area where the bird had been seen was closed off and policed with armed guards. The result was favorable publicity and enhanced professional status and increased funding for the insiders. In retrospect, the process appears to have been corrupt per se.
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