Nice digs

You can take a virtual tour of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology here (QuickTime format).

Endless summer?

A reminder--out here, Cornell made this promise:

A final report on the 2005-06 ivory-bill search will be issued later this summer.

Labor Day is fading in the rear-view mirror, my kids are back in school, and the NFL regular season has opened, yet still no final report has been issued.

What's going on here? Will we see that report before the autumnal equinox on Sept 23?

2nd Annual IBWO Celebration in Brinkley!

...now scheduled for February 2007.

Some details are here.

More from Bobby Harrison

Here.

An excerpt:

And there are speakers, including Bobby Harrison, a key member of the Ivory-billed Recovery Team. He'll discuss the elusive bird that he believes lives in the Big Woods area of Eastern Arkansas.

"My feeling is the bird avoids man at all costs," said Harrison, who has spotted ivory-bills on five occasions.

Although no photos or videos of the birds were made by searchers last winter, Harrison said there were several undocumented sightings by trained observers and at least three credible sightings by people living in the area. Recordings of the bird's unique rapping on trees also indicate its presence.

Last winter Harrison spent most of his time in the woods putting up cameras aimed at likely nesting spots and taking them down.

This winter he plans on placing four animated decoys -- two males and two females -- on trees in hopes of attracting real ivory-bills. Cameras will be trained on the decoys.

Harrison animated the wood decoys with the help of students at a technical high school in Huntsville, Ala., where he lives and teaches at Oakwood College. He figures each one took 60 hours to complete.

"I've love to see one of them ripped apart by an ivory-bill," he said.

Article on IBWO DNA

A new article has appeared on Cornell's web site here.

Here's one sentence from the article:

Except for fleeting glimpses of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, several seconds of video footage, and intriguing sounds, ivory-bills have remained elusive since their reappearance in 2004.

Here's another excerpt:

“Before the rediscovery in Arkansas, the main hope for ivory-bill conservation was in Cuba,” said Martjan Lammertink, a research scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a coauthor of the study.

The quote above seems an odd one, given that Lammertink authored this 1995 article entitled "No more hope for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker". After repeated, fruitless searches in Cuba, Lammertink wrote:

The conclusion must be that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, C. principalis, had become extinct by 1990.

North American Birds article revisited

Here are a few additional notes on the Rosenberg/Rohrbaugh/Lammertink-authored article published last year in the Dec '04-Feb '05 issue of North American Birds:

1. An interesting excerpt (from page 206):

Documentation in the form of "sight records" of this species has of course not been considered acceptable by records committees or ornithologists for many decades, and even still photographs have been discounted as evidence. Although sight reports are of interest, confirmation by photograph--especially videotape--is considered the sine qua non of Ivory-billed reports.

2. Another excerpt (also from page 206):

...Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon Arkansas will be coordinating the efforts of other visiting birders, and we will be creating an eBird-like web site where birders can report where they looked, what they saw, and upload any supporting notes or photographs of possible Ivory-billeds.

Has this "eBird-like web site" been created?

3. On page 200, it says that "suet stations" were used in the search effort.

Of the seven accompanying photos, the first three are clear shots of very ordinary-looking holes in trees; two others are of carved Ivory-bill decoys.

Down the slippery slope

1. Mindy LaBranche writes about her alleged April 10, 2004 Ivory-bill sighting in the Wells College magazine here (PDF format, 2.6MB).

Here's an excerpt (the bold font is mine):

...But due to the secrecy of our mission, we were forbidden to talk about it for more than a year. We had to distract and deceive. If pressed mercilessly, we had to lie outright to family, friends, and colleagues. My cousin jokingly told her family I was missing her wedding because of “some bird emergency,” not entirely out of character for me, I guess. We were advised to avoid discussing it with people “in the know”, particularly over radio, cell phone, email, and in public. It thus was given various code names including “snipe” and “Elvis” (being near Memphis furthered the Elvis illusion). Our mission was dubbed the Arkansas Inventory Project, and we were given cover stories to use if we were questioned.

A similar version of LaBranche's story also appears on Cornell's web site here, but note that the "deception/lying/cover story" parts are missing.

In my humble opinion, lying about the perceived "little things" can grow into a habit that will eventually come back to haunt you.

2. In the "it's a small world" department: note that LaBranche co-authored this Red-cockaded Woodpecker paper (PDF format; 600kB) with Jeffrey R. Walters of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Jeffrey R. Walters is identified here as one of the peer reviewers of Cornell's original Science article.

Gallagher to speak

Related article here.