"We have never said there was a giant population"

Ray Brown did an interview with Tim Gallagher for his March 6, 2006 "Talkin' Birds" show.

The show is available online here (MP3 format). The Ivory-bill segment lasts about 7 minutes, starting at the 8:30 mark.

Gallagher almost immediately blames low water levels for this season's lack of success. When prompted by Brown, he also touches on the "conspiracy theorists" and claims "the public is still really enthusiastic about this".

You should listen to the whole segment.

"Definitive, high-quality sightings"

The New Zealand Herald writes about Cornell's Ivory-bill claim here.

One excerpt:

"Our interpretation is that it's [the Luneau bird] an ivory bill," says Ron Rohrbaugh, director of Cornell's Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Research Project. "We've had numerous sightings from experienced wildlife biologists, who are trained observers of birds. Those are definitive, high-quality sightings. And we have acoustic evidence that suggests the bird is there."

Another perspective

This blog posting provides an interesting perspective on the "Ivory-bill" situation. The author is a patent lawyer who has previously blogged about the Hwang stem cell scandal.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

One reader asked of the relation of the woodpecker story to intellectual property. At an abstract level, the woodpecker story shows how an article published in a prestigious journal such as Science can create economic value. The published article generated a pledge of $10 million from Congress. Further, before going public, the Nature Conservancy/Cornell bought up land, giving them an economic interest that the story be believed. This issue of imprimatur is quite similar to the complaints of Bob Park about the Patent Office granting patents to BlackLight. Although the underlying science (certainly in Park's eyes) might be false, the grant of the patent created economic value for BlackLight, because they can get investors by pointing to the patent. Similarly, Cornell caused certain things to happen by pointing to the paper in Science. If the story proves false, there has been a misallocation of resources. This would be similar in theme to the misallocation of resources caused in the Jan-Hendrik Schon flap, wherein publications in the journal Science (ultimately retracted) caused other people (and the federal government) to invest in areas which had little chance of generating any academic or financial payout. The issue of imprimatur is also relevant to the problems the journal Science has had in publishing the false work of Woo Suk Hwang. There the underlying science was unquestionably wrong. Nevertheless, because of the imprimatur, third parties made decisions on funding (for example, Proposition 71) that cannot be undone simply by a retraction of the papers. Further, in a rather bizarre twist, although Hwang's papers have been retracted, Hwang's patent applications have not been withdrawn.

"Mammoth" discovery

Here.

4/9/06 update:
The "Mammoth" article is available in legible form here (PDF; 4.7 Meg).

Oh, the suspense

Sharon Stiteler, volunteer IBWO searcher, writes about a conversation with Jim Fitzpatrick here.

Here's an excerpt:

Jen asked the inevitable question, "I suppose no one in your group had an encounter?" Jim and I looked at each other, what would the other say? Does he know something that I don't know about the search this winter? Do I know something that he might know? Does he think I know he knows something? Do I know, if he knows if he knows something? The questions in my head got too confusing and I told Jen our pat answer: "I am not at liberty to say if anyone in our group did or did not have an encounter with that particular species of woodpecker."

Is "Wikiscience" on the horizon?

The current "Ivory-bill" fiasco is pretty clearly not a triumph of science (or Science).

As the world changes, will we see a move towards Wikiscience?

"The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will become commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished. It becomes a trail of edits and experiments posted in real time — an ever evolving "document." Contributions are not assigned."

There is a related thread on Slashdot here. One commenter wrote:

Actually, Wikipedia has the same level of accuracy of any of the major encyclopedias (Britannica, etc.) And Wikipedia entries are peer reviewed, since it's pretty hard to conceal a bad entry on a public forum. Scientific journals typically have a very small review group, who simply may not have time to properly review them or confirm their validity. The result have been some very embarrassing and truly horrendous articles; in fact, as many of two thirds of all papers related to drug research have later turned out to be false. And there are fairly simple mechanisms for preventing wackos from posting trash on your wiki.

Another notable comment is here.

"The Grail Bill"

Posted today on the Arkansas Birding listserv...

Deja vu

Some familiar names, Cornell, and NPR get excited about some really flimsy Pearl River evidence in 2002 here. (If you have time, listen to both 9-minute segments of Christopher Joyce's report.)

I wrote about the Pearl River parallels previously here.

"Does the ivory-bill exist..."

The Philadelphia Inquirer explores that question a bit today.

Straight talk

Someone recently suggested that this old skit might be easily adapted for use by Cornell's "Ivory-bill" PR department.

"Peckergate: The Ivory-billed Woodpecker hoax"

There's new "Ivory-bill" stuff from John Wall at WorldTwitch here and here.

An excerpt:

Rather than conceding that the Ivorybill "rediscovery" was based on erroneous sight records and a misidentified video and returning grant money taken away from worthwhile conservation projects, management at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and their allies have been working overtime to keep this lucrative hoax alive. They're now in the bunker, lobbing stinkbombs at Jerome Jackson, David Sibley and anyone else who threatens their finances and careers. They also seem to be calling in favors. Thus, rather than standing up to the abuse of bird conservation for publicity and profit, the American Bird Conservancy, a small organization far down the pecking order for government grants, has issued a ridiculous statement attacking Jackson. (Comments.) Consequently, it's not surprising that most people dependent on ornithology or conservation for their paychecks have been afraid to take on the powerful interests behind the Ivorybill hoax. However, a few whistleblowers have surfaced anonymously in the comments on Tom Nelson's Ivory-Bill Skeptic blog, which is the best place to keep up with developments in this scandalous affair.

Sibley Schmibley

The Theater of the Absurd continues here.

Yeah, that's the ticket

Cornell volunteer Ivory-bill searcher Sharon Stiteler (aka Birdchick) has a theory.

Here's an excerpt:

...Maybe Cornell and The Nature Conservancy have had excellent documentation and photos so far. Maybe they had intended to keep this secret for years, but somehow it leaked and they had to show their cards last spring. Knowing that everyone and their birding brother would want to search the area, they threw out red herrings and poor evidence to allow the inevitable media circus and scrutiny to pass so that the woodpeckers would eventually be left alone in peace. Maybe all the skeptics were recruited by Cornell to aid in the misdirection.

Or maybe my parents watched too many JFK/UFO/Elvis conspiracy theory videos when I was a kid and they rubbed off on me.

Brief comments on a Sibley presentation

Here.

Clueless (at best)

Check out this new video from National Geographic News.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Ok, nearly a year ago, Cornell announces one of the "biggest conservation stories of the century"--the rediscovery of The Grail Bird.

In place of "evidence", they offer a blurry video of a different species (and a branch stub). From distant, widespread locations, they also offer some ambient sounds also easily produced by a large number of non-Grail-bird sources. Their so-called "robust sightings" are so uniformly weak that as much as two years later, no documentation has even been submitted to any Rare Birds Committee.

In hindsight, you might think that Cornell would have become a laughingstock from Day 1.

It's interesting to consider why this farce has continued for almost a year now. How did we get this far without much more candid public conversation about the shocking weakness of Cornell's claim?

I see at least four major reasons:

1. The feeling that Cornell must have confirmed it (no serious institution would make this claim if it wasn't true).

2. Fear of alienating friends on the team (I think a healthy percentage of serious US birders had a fairly close connection to one or more Cornell team members.)

3. Fear of hindering conservation efforts (even if Cornell's claim wasn't true, the resultant money flow towards Big Woods conservation was A Good Thing).

4. Fear of reprisal (skeptics who did speak up faced vicious personal attacks, on the 'net and elsewhere; for some people, speaking skeptically could also adversely affect book sales and other income)

A paragraph from Dan Purrington's recent Louisiana Birding List post illustrates reasons 2 and 3 above:

I have avoided weighing in on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker question up to this point, primarily because two ornithologists I greatly respect (and count as friends), Van Remsen and Ken Rosenberg, have been directly involved. Moreover, it has not seemed advisable to offer arguments which might hinder efforts to protect possible IBWO habitat. So please excuse these remarks.

A couple of articles on the debate

One here:

...“We can be fooled by our biases and expectations,’’ said Louis Bevier, who also spoke at the state ornithological association meeting and who has co-authored an article in Science magazine questioning the Cornell team. “We would want there to be an ivory-billed woodpecker. But we think this is a pileated woodpecker."...

...and another article here (registration may be required):

...The 26-member Cornell team, ironically, was put together by Sara Barker, a 1994 graduate of Colby College, more than two years ago. Attempts to interview Barker by press time were unsuccessful...

Comment from Arkansas Rare Birds Committee member

Last fall, the Arkansas Rare Birds Committee voted to accept the Luneau video as proof of the Ivory-bill's existence in that state.

In August last year, I exchanged some emails with a member of that Committee. Here is a relevant comment from that person:

My view on the matter was that there was no need for a deliberation because it was not a new species for the state and in fact it was accepted for publication in peer reviewed journal (Science). This means it was sent to a[sic] accepted by professional ornithologists--a much tougher group that any state record committee.