The birding community is slowly dividing into camps: The True Believers, The Really-Want-to Believers, The Mostly Dubious, and The Non-believers. Where do you stand?
I must admit that I started out in the first category, but have drifted, over time, into the Dubious category, mostly because no other confirmation of the bird's/birds' existence has come to light.
...For me, the matter is one for the future: clear, unimpeachable evidence of the persistence of this bird has not yet been obtained (or released), and so we, all, wait for something satisfactory. When that evidence is obtained, if it ever is, I doubt that there will be much need for debate about a few pixels...I have found it difficult to force my own mind in the past 12 months to stay 'open', as it were, to the possibility that the sight records indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas. I have maintained the openness as a sort of policy chiefly because I know and have birded with several people who have reported the species, Tim Gallagher in particular...Ned Brinkley is editor of North American Birds, a publication that last year published a lengthy special section on the Ivory-bill "rediscovery". It's interesting to see him listed along with Gallagher, John Fitzpatrick and Ken Rosenberg on this page of past Cornell World Series of Birding teams.
I think the proper tense is "could have been useful" had the same experts who wrote the Science piece been listened to when many of them addressed Fitzpatrick directly. At this point the time and money have been spent I just hope that less questionable evidence is presented and that there is actually at least 1 bird found after the current field season. Otherwise Cornell will have gone further than anyone in actually proving the species is extinct.In the special "North American Birds" issue mentioned above, a "Matthew Sharp" is listed as Photo Editor, and is also listed as a co-author (with Ned Brinkley) of an "Editor's Notebook" piece on the Ivory-bill.
A forthcoming issue of North American Birds, with Ned Brinkley leading the way, will focus on birder responsibilities...As for your chances, keep in mind that something like 100,000 hrs of field time by skilled field people has yielded a grant total of probably less than a minute of cumulative observation time, and that only a handful of those people ever got a glimpse...I am as certain as I can be in the absence of tangible evidence that Ivory-billed still exists in Louisiana...However, If Arkansas' Elvis is any indication, we could have missed dozens of birds in the Pearl. Elvis is not only incredibly wary, seldom allowing more than a glimpse before flying off not to be relocated, but astoundingly quiet.(Note: all bold font in this post is mine).
They state that the "wing-twisting" hypothesis contradicts all models and photographic analyses of flapping flight in birds.In the upcoming days and weeks, lots of qualified people will be carefully reading Sibley's paper and Fitzpatrick's response. I think a vast majority of those people will recognize the above statement as hogwash.
(David Leuneau[sic], UALR) "Originally we published five points that made it an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and not a Pileated Woodpecker, since going back we now have 9 points."Note that Gene DePriest is not merely a "resident"--he's also the guy that sells the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Cheeseburger. In my opinion, a future, more accurately named "Pixelated Pileated Cheeseburger" may be significantly less lucrative.
Jay Harrod with the Nature Conservancy of Arkansas says disputes like these are all part of the scientific process and that 19 sightings have now been reported.
(Jay Harrod, The Nature Conservancy) "So we feel strongly we've proven the case. The Ivory Billed Woodpecker is there and we still feel strongly."
(Mayor Billy Clay, Brinkley) "Cornell University has broken it down frame by frame they've used measurements on the white its just somebody looking for a little publicity."
(Doug Hunt, Resident) "I figure we've had people here that have seen it because people have been on the bayou for 40 years, but I haven't seen it."
(Gene Depriest, Resident) "There's over a half a million acres. It’s like hunting a needle in a haystack, a lot of ground, it's hard to find."
Out of 550,000 acres, research teams have scoured roughly 16% of the habitat.
In an e-mail to Reuters on Friday, Luneau questioned the Sibley group's hypothesis that the bird in the video was a pileated woodpecker.
"They have not produced a single video of this relatively common bird doing what they describe," Luneau wrote in answer to a request for comment. "In fact, we have studied many (pileated woodpecker) videos and videos of other birds and we have not found a single case that would confirm either of these assertions. I believe that their hypothesis describes an impossibility."
My view is that Cornell has seriously damaged its credibility by insisting on the definitive nature of it analysis. Cornell is showing far too much certainty in relation to the quality of its evidence. Cornell would have done far better to have admitted to uncertainty, retracted its position regarding the "definitive" nature of its evidence, and continued working this case as a hypothesis regarding the existence of an ivory-billed woodpecker in that locale.I agree.
The analysis by Sibley et al is new, but it's based on information and images that have been available for almost 11 months, and again I find it remarkable that this listserve has been so silent about the evidence. Then again, there has been a remarkable amount of fervor surrounding the initial report, with massive numbers of people believing simply because they WANTED TO BELIEVE, and attacking anyone who expressed any skepticism. As long ago as last June, when I mentioned in conversations that I thought the video showed a Pileated Woodpecker, some people reacted violently and accused me of being anti-conservation, or worse. With passions running so high, many I.D. experts may have decided to lie low and stay out of the controversy.Kenn's initial posting has already resulted in some well-reasoned responses--this might be a very welcome change for you if you've visited the BirdForum Ivory-bill threads in recent months.
So I have to commend David Sibley et al for coming forward with their analysis. If you know David, you know that not only is he a genius, he's also modest and very quiet. He has no reason to seek publicity, nothing to gain by sparking controversy -- if anything, the wrath of "the believers" could hurt the sales of his books. So it took courage for him to go public with his doubts. Here's a challenge to the rest of you I.D. experts, playing it safe on the sidelines. Read the papers, look at the video, let us know if you detect any points that the papers published so far have missed. I have a lot of respect for all the authors of both papers, but I have to say that I still think the video shows the underside of the wings of a Pileated Woodpecker flying away above the plane of the camera. If you can prove me wrong, I'd love to hear about it.
Next winter, says Fitzpatrick, the search is likely to be reduced, with more reliance on robotic cameras. If still unsuccessful, it may then be called off.On the other hand, if you believe Jay Harrod here, you might get the idea that the situation is rather rosy (the bold font is mine):
Jay Harrod, spokesman for the Nature Conservancy of Arkansas, said Thursday that he wasn't surprised by what Sibley and his team had to say.
"The scientific process would be broken if other scientists didn't come forward and question this," Harrod said.
"But we have found the bird," he said. "The video and all the evidence together prove that and we stand behind that."
Harrod said since November, they've had 10 additional sightings of the bird and 20 new sound recordings.
The President's Award for Conservation will be presented to Tim Gallagher, Bobby Harrison, and Gene Sparling, who made headlines this year for rediscovering the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was previously thought to be extinct.(I don't know for sure, but it seems likely that the "President" here is the President of the Explorers Club, ie this guy, rather than the President of the United States.)
In the journal, one set of researchers argues that a bird videotaped in 2004 by David Luneau of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was probably a common pileated woodpecker.
Gov. Mike Huckabee said the article illustrates the authors' poor bird-watching ability more than it proves that the ivory-billed woodpecker doesn't live in Arkansas.
"Some of the world's leading ornithologists have verified through sight and sound the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker," Huckabee said. "The fact that these skeptics can't find it says more about their bird-hunting ability than the accuracy of the experts' opinions."
The county's plan would also identify locations where scrub jays live and provide safeguards to protect and maintain the birds' habitat.
The project, in progress for more than four years, has been delayed because the lead researcher went to Arkansas to study the re-discovered ivory bill woodpecker, Meese said.
The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has affected so many lives in so many ways that it would be unethical for me to stand by silently while decisions were based on information that I believed was flawed.
In the Sibley paper, similar analytical tools were used to reach a different conclusion than in the original paper, akin to two researchers performing the same experiment and getting different results. Nor have the "results" presented in the first paper been replicated in two years of herculean effort. In the world of science, a situation of this nature would generally be considered to be at the "back to the drawing board" stage. And I think that's where the IBWO is at. Still awaiting rediscovery.The Birdchaser says "Ivory-billed Woodpecker Doubts Explode":
Its a sad day, but hopefully one that can help us refocus our efforts and help us figure out where we're really at with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and bird conservation in general.From TheCabin.net, a truly remarkable quote from David Luneau:
"Obviously we'd all agree that it's easier to get video of a pileated woodpecker than an ivory-bill," Luneau said. "But the video that I got of the ivory-bill doesn't match up to any of the videos of the pileated. And for that reason, we say it's an ivory-bill, and we're much more confident about it now than we were last year."Cascadia Scorecard says "Sometimes Extinction is Forever":
...I'm sure the debate is far from over, but I'm ready to conclude that the ivory-billed has gone the way of the dodo.From NPR:
Now an author of famous birding books, David Alan Sibley, offers his take. He says the bird in the video isn't really perched on the tree.From The Birmingham News:
"We're saying the bird is behind the tree, and it has lifted its wings, spread its wings completely over its back and is starting to flap its wings as it pushes away from the tree," he says.
Sibley and a co-author said they met separately with John Fitzpatrick, director of Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology, last year to air their concerns.telegraph.co.uk headline:
Fitzpatrick, who declared the tape valid proof in a Science article last year, said that the two aren't a representative group of birders and based their evidence on interpretive sketches. Sibley's argument and his response in the journal make "a good capper to the discussions," Fitzpatrick said.
...
Patten said he and a co-author, Louis Bevier of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, visited Fitzpatrick in June to discuss their concerns.
"I remember Fitz actually saying, `Well what would you do if you were in my shoes?'" Patten said in a telephone interview on March 14. "I was hoping that he and maybe Cornell would maybe dial it down a little - this wasn't perfect evidence - and make it clear when they were soliciting donations."
Sighting of extinct woodpecker proves to be wishful thinkingFrom ABC News:
Now, in a new peer-reviewed article in America's premier scientific journal Science, America's most-noted living birder, no less — one David Sibley — says it ain't so.
Sibley has spent his life honing his powers of close observation of birds — often birds in flight; his newly pre-eminent field guides are noted especially for his depictions of the differing flight styles of different species.
Sibley's magisterial and definitive "Sibley Guide to Birds" is generally acknowledged to have taken the mantle — if anyone has — from the legendary Roger Tory Peterson's series of field guides.
In his closely reasoned new article, "Comment on "Ivory-billed Woodpecker … ," Sibley and co-authors Louis Bevier, Michael Patten and Chris Elphick lay out all the reasons to conclude that the ecstatic sightings and beliefs of last summer were all spurred by a spotting of the similar but somewhat smaller and grayish-billed pileated woodpecker — not the ivory-billed.
The ivory-billed woodpecker may have faded back into extinction. After more than a year of debate over whether a video taken in an Arkansas swamp really does show a surviving member of the species, a team of ornithologists and bird watchers have weighed in with a "devastating" critique.
...
"The whole thing is sad," says the team's leader David Sibley, a bird illustrator from Massachusetts. "I wish we were reporting something different. But it is very important for the truth to be out there."
...
"The Sibley critique is pretty devastating," says ornithologist Rick Prum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, lead author of the withdrawn manuscript.
With every day that passes, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker looks more like an apparition or, more likely, a case of mistaken identity.
Fitzpatrick's team concludes that available data on wingspan and flight style does indeed indicate an ivory-billed woodpecker. The researchers also point out that the video was presented to the Arkansas Audubon Society, which voted unanimously to accept it as proof of the bird's existence.
...
"Nothing in the video is inconsistent with [a] pileated woodpecker, and many of our key points are not refuted by the Cornell team's response," Sibley said. "Therefore the video cannot be proof of the existence of [an ivory-bill]."
David A. Sibley, one of the country's top bird experts, said today that the woodpecker that appears fleetingly in a blurry videotape taken in an Arkansas swamp, in a discovery that electrified the world of birding last year, was not an ivory-billed woodpecker after all.
Instead, Mr. Sibley and three colleagues write in the journal Science, the bird is a common pileated woodpecker, and there is no conclusive evidence that the near-mythical ivory bill has escaped extinction.
Identification of the bird in the videotape as an ivory-billed woodpecker "rests on mistaken interpretations of the bird's posture," according to a research team headed by David A. Sibley of Concord, Mass.
Since the original announcement of the Arkansas rediscovery there has been a small segment of the ornithological community that has been less than happy with the quality of the documentary evidence that has been presented to substantiate the sightings. This is inevitable in a scientific setting and everyone involved agrees that stronger documentation is vital. We can be no less demanding of any possible encounters that might occur in our own project.
That black trailing half of the PIWO wing just won't go away no matter how hard you hypothesize.
The reported rediscovery of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Arkansas has been mentioned on ohio-birds many times over the last 11 months, which suggests that this is an acceptable topic for this forum.
Last month in Ecuador we caught up with a related species, the Powerful Woodpecker (Campephilus pollens). I'd missed it on previous trips to South America -- not surprisingly, since it's rather rare. In The Birds of Ecuador, Vol. 1, Robert Ridgely says that it's "rare to uncommon and perhaps local." In Vol. 2, he expands on this to say that its habits are "similar to other Campephilus woodpeckers, though Powerful's home range seems exceptionally large and as a result the species is encountered only infrequently." We found a family group in forest on the east slope. The birds were wary, as one would expect with a large woodpecker, and they were in dense forest, but we were able to follow them at a respectful distance for a long time, and Kim even got decent photos with her small digital camera.
The encounter got me to thinking about our North American species of Campephilus, and I went back and reread Roger Tory Peterson's account of seeing the Ivory-bill in 1942. (This was in RTP's wonderful book, Birds Over America, published in 1948.) He had sought the bird in South Carolina on the basis of rumors there in the 1930s, but finally he went to the Singer Tract in Louisiana, the last place where there were still known to be any living Ivory-bills (two adult females had been seen there a few months earlier). The Singer Tract was big, 80,000 acres, and there were no stakeouts such as roost sites, so Peterson and his companions knew it wouldn't be easy. It wasn't: it took them a whole day and a half to find the birds. Once they found them, though, they were able to follow them for almost an hour.
Now, about these freakishly elusive, supernaturally un-photographable birds in Arkansas... Once you look at the only "proof," the famous four-second video, and realize that it actually shows a Pileated Woodpecker, you have to wonder: What's really going on there?
Kenn Kaufman
Rocky Ridge, Ohio
Now, we read, the ivory-billed has been heard, if not seen, in Congaree National Park.Additional sources of double-knock sounds include Pileated and Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, American Crows, gunshots, and trees knocking together.
In December, The Associated Press reported, Gary Peters of the U.S. Forest Service in South Carolina, heard the unique double-knock of the ivory-billed woodpecker. No other bird in South Carolina makes that knock, he said.
It's disappointing to feel the hope drain from my body like this, but what's even more disturbing is the kind of vitriol I see among the devotees of the Ivorybill. I have friends who are deeply angry at me for considering the skeptics' arguments.
Sadly for the Arkansas Chambers of Commerce, it seems this 'Lazarus' bird may have been an ex-pecker all along.
The apparent rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 2005 – hailed as one of the great conservation triumphs of recent times – may be merely a case of mistaken identity, according to a new study.
...
"When I first heard the news, I was really excited," says Michael Patten, director of research at the University of Oklahoma's Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville, US. "I went right to Science's website, and I was crestfallen. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is all they have’. I wanted them to be right, but it was pretty apparent right away that they sure don't have much here."
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But if there really are ivory-billed woodpeckers in the Arkansas woods, critics say, should searchers not have seen another by now? "They might not be visible on two or three trips or 50 hours of observation," says [Jerome] Jackson. "But now we're talking about thousands of hours by the Cornell people alone. In my opinion, we should have had something by now."
I think frame 33.3 (that Fitz et al interpret with a sketch of the upright woodpecker behind the tree) is particularly key in the discussion of the Luneau video evidence. You do a really good job of going through the video on this page, but your interpretation really jumps out when you look at a blown up and slowed down section of the video.Please take a look at this video clip from the Luneau video, blown up and slowed down:
With the framecaptures, all you get is blobs, but when you look at the blob move you get the gestalt (the sequence in motion is greater than the sum of its parts). It really becomes evident that this is an underwing (complete with black trailing edge and no
black median stripe) on a down stroke and not a bird sitting up with a folded wing. There is no way that his sketch of the bird half hidden behind the tree is accurate.
...
The wings are also "bending" because this bird is flapping hard to gain altitude, it isn't gliding down - it has to leap up and beat its wings for all it is worth to get lift and steering etc ...
So, what is needed is a clip like the one below - in slo mo -AND a sketch (also below) - that shows the way the bird is positioned. Your case shows best when it is in motion ... the freakin taxidermy wing isn't moving and the feathers aren't being forced to bend the way that a bird's wing does ...
...Their paper announcing the find was completed and sent to Science April 6th.I just re-read the above article yet again. If you're interested in the Ivory-bill controversy, that particular article is just chock-full of interesting information.
...
Then, BAM-bam. On April 26th this year, with peer reviews of the paper still out, news of the bird began to hit the Internet. What was now called the Big Woods Conservation Partnership went into high gear -- biologists pulling an all-nighter editing the paper for Science, managers notifying agencies and others that a press conference they thought they had three weeks to plan for would be held April 28th in Washington, D.C., with Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
Science published the paper online the morning of the press conference...
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