Phillip Hoose to appear in Knoxville tomorrow

Details here.

AOU Ivory-bill presentations!

I'm wondering if the grand "Nine pairs of Ivory-bills in Florida!!" rumor will boil down to something more like "Double-knockies heard in Florida".

John Trapp emailed me the following information:

I believe that the last time you mentioned anything
about the program for next month’s North American
Ornithological Congress was back on July 4th, when you reported finding no mention of IBWOs on the program. I noticed just today that the program now includes the following two papers on IBWOs:

Use of time-lapse surveillance cameras in the search
for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (by J. R. Hill III, R.
Rohrbaugh, M. D. Luneau, M. Lammertink, and E.
Swarthout)

The double knock of Campephilus woodpeckers: what
should an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sound like? (by G.
E. Hill, D. J. Mennill, B. Rolek, T. Hicks, and K.
Swiston)

The program is available here (PDF format; 2.4MB).

A few Google searches turned up this Auburn site, where there is a Dr. Geoffrey Hill, an M.S. student named Brian Rolek, and a list of alumni including Dr. Daniel Mennill. Note that Auburn could be described as a major southeastern university located near the Florida panhandle.

Mennill's name is linked to a University of Windsor homepage here; one of Mennill's graduate students here is named Kyle Swiston. This graduate student position is currently available at the Mennill Lab.

Jim Fitzpatrick to speak in New Jersey

Excerpt from an article here:

The second major program this weekend is the Meadowlands Festival of Birding in nearby New Jersey. Most of the nearly two dozen events take place tomorrow, but several are also scheduled for Sunday.

A highlight will be an address by bird expert Jim Fitzpatrick, one of just a handful of people who have made a confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, an extremely rare species thought to be extinct until two years ago.

If you hear Fitzpatrick's talk, please let me know via email or a comment. I'd like to find out how many lies are told, and I'm also interested in the audience's reaction.

Holzman on bark scaling

Steve Holzman has posted this on BirdForum:

After looking at hundreds of trees and measuring the marks on quite a few, I'm just not convinced I could tell PIWO scaled trees from IBWO scaled trees. Paul Sykes and I thought we were onto something with the measurements, but there is just too much variability in individual trees, degrees of decay, and frankly individual measurement error to make any groove size difference meaningful. I guess we'll just have to find some Ivory-bills scaling a tree and THEN take some measurements ;^)

Additional related information is here.

Fading euphoria on the USFWS Ivory-bill site

The USFWS Ivory-bill updates here tell a tale of fading euphoria.

At first, these updates were labeled "weekly", and then "bi-weekly". As of today, exactly one update has been published in the last 51 weeks.

No Cornell IBWO search for Birdchick this time?

An excerpt from the comment section here:

At this point I don't plan on going. Call me a sap, but being away from my husband for two weeks is just too much for me. I learned that ten days was my cut off...

Andrew to give IBWO update at LSU, 9/20/06

A couple of days ago, Van Remsen posted this on the Louisiana Birding listserv:

LABIRD: Baton Rouge Audubon Society is sponsoring a talk ("Ivory-billed Woodpecker Update") by Jon Andrew, chair of the Steering Committee of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Team (and Chief of the NWR system in SE USA), on 20 Sep. at 7 PM at LSU's Hilltop Arboretum. General public welcomed.

I'd like to find out what Andrew says. If you attend this talk, please drop me an email (or submit a comment).

Will this story ever again appear in the MSM?

A recent commenter (The Carpinterio) asked if this story will ever again appear in the mainstream media (MSM), and if so, what would the "news hook" be?

I think the probability is 100% that more MSM coverage is coming.

Potential "news hooks" are abundant. A few examples:

New articles/papers from "big-name" skeptics

New developments in the Grand Prairie irrigation project halt

Updates (or lack of updates) from the vast Ivory-bill Recovery Team

Coverage of next month's AOU meeting (remember, Cornell's alleged Ivory-bill rediscovery was front-and-center at last year's AOU meeting).

I think it's inevitable that details of this debacle will eventually bubble up to some of the biggest sites in the blogosphere (some of those sites see as much traffic in a day as this site gets in six months).

In my opinion, this prediction by John Wall is spot-on, and the resulting "blame game" will receive MSM coverage:

I predict that the Ivorybill "rediscovery" ultimately will become such an embarrassment to those involved that they will deny responsibility and blame each other.

Cornell calls for '07 search volunteers!

Here.

It looks like volunteers are only needed January 3, 2007 thru April 21, 2007.

An excerpt:

We will fill slots first according to skill level and relevant experience; remaining slots will be filled according to the order in which applications were received, for those meeting minimum requirements.

Cornell's Volunteer Agreement Form is posted here.

More pullback?

I've noticed that there is now no prominent mention of the Ivory-bill on the World Wildlife Fund website.

In addition, the World Wildlife Fund no longer seems to be paying for a sponsored link on a Google search for "ivory-billed woodpecker".

At one time, if I remember correctly, a World Wildlife Fund ad appeared first in Google's list of sponsored links for "ivory-billed woodpecker".

A pattern of deception

The American Heritage dictionary provides these two definitions for the word "lie":

1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.

2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.

By those definitions, since April 2005, Cornell has repeatedly lied to the public regarding their Ivory-bill claims.

Very specifically, here are some examples of Cornell's deceptions, large and small:

1. Regarding the wingbeat frequency of the Luneau bird--

a) In Cornell's online Luneau video analysis, they state:

The bird in the Luneau video flies in a straight, direct “beeline” flight without changing its wingbeat frequency for 4.5 sec before disappearing among the trees.

b) In their response to Sibley's commentary, Fitz et al also state:

The Luneau woodpecker flies with a wingbeat frequency of 8.6 Hz without undulation for more than 4 s.

Both statements above are outright lies, since no one, including Cornell, can discern more than about one second of individual wingbeats in the Luneau video. More details are here.

2. The "photo montage" saga

In their response to Sibley's commentary, Cornell offered up a deceptive photo montage. A right-leaning tree in their original paper inexplicably becomes a left-leaning tree in their response; this completely nullifies the key "wrist-to-tailtip" measurement from their original paper. More details are here.

3. Cornell has repeatedly used deceptive "weasel wording" in an attempt to convince us that only a small fraction of the Big Woods has been searched.

An example is here (the bold font is mine):

The area defined as the Big Woods covers 550,000 acres and so far 13% of that (72,000 acres) has been systematically searched during the last two field seasons.

The key weasel word is, of course, "systematically"--evidently, this only applies to areas that have been transect-searched. With this weasel wording, a square mile that has been thoroughly covered by ghillie-suited Cornell searchers, private searchers, hunters, remote cameras, ARUs, pilots wearing helmet-cams, etc etc may still be officially "unsearched".

4. In December '05, Ken Rosenberg went on NPR and played some ARU kent calls, claiming that they "may very likely be an Ivory-billed Woodpecker". Rosenberg failed to mention that several searchers reported hearing and seeing blue jays making sounds very much like this in this area. More details here.

5. Ron Rohrbaugh publicly claimed that Cornell's alleged Ivory-bill sightings were "very top-quality sightings". That description is simply preposterous.

6. There are major inconsistencies in various Cornell retellings of Gene Sparling's alleged IBWO sighting. Details are here.

7. In Cornell's response to Sibley's paper, they stated (the bold font is mine):

After studying the evidence at length, the Bird Records Committee of the Arkansas Audubon Society voted unanimously to accept the documentation of ivory-billed woodpecker.

The vote was actually 4-1. Mike Mlodinow dissented.

8. There are major discrepancies in various Cornell stories about the timing of their original Science paper acceptance and an alleged leak on a "nation-wide listserv".

For example, in various places, Cornell told us that their original Science paper was accepted on April 25, April 26, and April 27, 2005. More details are here.