"Mystery Warbler from Cuba"

Here.

Update: Louis Bevier posted some thoughts here.

Wingbeat follies

From the comment section:

I'd like to see Tom or one of his blogging bullies offer actual data on PIWO wingbeats to refute the wingbeat data used by Cornell.

That's already been done.

The Nolin (BirdViewing.com) Pileated videos are here (WMV Format, about 6.1 Meg). One of these videos shows a known Pileated in a short escape flight calculated at 8.6 wingbeats per second for four wingbeats.

In addition to a branch stub, the Luneau video shows a bird in a longer escape flight that manages 8.5 wingbeats per second for six wingbeats.

Note that we have exactly zero videos showing known Ivory-bills in escape flight at any wingbeat frequency.

More here.

Give until it hurts?

Here and/or here.

"Nessie the Woodpecker"

An April 2006 post from Jim Beers is here.

Two articles from Rick Wright

Rick Wright (editor of the American Birding Association "Winging It" newsletter) posted this back in May.

A toned-down version of the above article appears in the latest Winging It issue. It's available online here (PDF format).

I agree with Wright's general point (well-described sight records can be valuable). However, I think the point is moot for the particular case of the Arkansas "Ivory-bill"--to the best of my knowledge, no sight record for that bird has ever been submitted to any birding records committee.

"These guys need to be taken down"

In case you missed it--"Methinks" posted this in the comment section yesterday:

This is an aside, and feel free to put it on its own thread, Tom, but over the last week the intrepid team of Fitzcrow-Harrison-Simon et al. were at a non-fundraiser (yeah, right) hosted jointly by the Wyoming TNC and the ARK TNC (can you spell "nice vacation on the company dime"?). There were buffalo dinners and presentations by the mighty Fitzcrow where, it was reported to this Non-believer (I left skeptic behind long ago), that Dr. Fitzcrow banged loudly and firmly on the IBWO drum.

He didn't mention the skeptics until asked. Rather, his current position seems to be that when you look at all the evidence that there is NO DOUBT that there are IBWO in ARK. He is now focusing NOT on the video, but rather on the flap rate and the audio recordings.

Now, they presented the audio as inconclusive, so I'm not sure how he wrangles out of that, but it must be good.

The Fraudulent piece here, and I mean FRAUD, is the fact that he is still presenting a film frame of the old IBWO, then playing the audio - and NOT TELLING THE AUDIENCE that the two (film and audio) are form different sources. The audience thought the audio of the flap rate came off the movie.

It is important to remember that their measure of IBWO flap rates come from an audio only, with no field notes, so we don't even know for sure that the flapping sound is an IBWO. If it was, we don't know what it was doing - fleeing, defending, fluttering, basking. No one knows.

He went on to say that people can blurr the wing patterns all they want, but the flap rate can't be wrong. Arghhhhh. Of course it can be wrong with a freakin sample size of 1! Of course it can be wrong, because the bird in the video is a PIWO. He is actually able to stand there and claim he is bring that bird back from the dead with this sort of evidence.

By linking the film image with the audio he is planting the idea in people's heads that he knows the species, and behaviour - and that is WRONG, snake-oily and WRONG. And to Fitzcrow and your minions,(yeah, we know you read it) shame on you!

This is High Powered Snake Oil - and these guys need to be taken down.

I feel I need a poem to lower the blood pressure...anybody got one?

There's gold in them thar irrational beliefs

Here.

An excerpt:

We have a spiffy new illustration of an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, so we have recreated two of our most popular designs with the new image: I BELIEVE and I WANT TO BELIEVE. Suggested by the Ivory-bills LiVE blog, we have also added three new slogans: I’m Wild About Ivory-bills, My Ivory-bill is smarter than your skeptic and BACK FROM THE BRINK.

At the same time, we have discontinued our I DON’T BELIEVE design. This one didn’t reflect our own personal feelings on this subject, so we weren’t happy having it in our store (this one was suggested by commentors on the Ivory-bill Skeptic blog). This one also didn’t sell. Seems like skeptics are cheaper than believers…

To be honest, we are not deeply following this saga. We do follow bird and birding-related news in general though, and this just seems like a great story...

Arkansas search results

According to this link, the most recent Bigfoot search season in Arkansas was just as successful as the most recent Ivory-bill search season there!

[sarcasm=on]

If you're still skeptical of the Arkansas Bigfoot:

1. On this map, note the tantalizing cluster of reports to the southwest of Little Rock. If the reports were erroneous, shouldn't they be uniformly distributed throughout Arkansas?

2. Please explain away some of the strengths of this robust White River report. (Unusual sounds heard not only by a human, but by a dog and some horses; further corroborated by a "primate area of a zoo" smell and another aging sight record from the area).

3. If you're not convinced that these sounds were made by a Bigfoot, please tell me with 100% certainty what DID make these sounds.

4. If you don't believe in the Arkansas Bigfoot, please provide some clear pictures of the population of eight-foot chimpanzees that must be the source of all these sight records.

[sarcasm=off]

Here is a good Birdforum post arguing that the quality of the evidence is the point.