More links

1. From the Montgomery Advertiser (the bold font is mine):

RANT: For the naysayers who sneer at every claim that the fabled ivory-billed woodpecker may not be extinct, despite the efforts of a team led by an Auburn University ornithologist that has found many indications that the magnificent bird is living in the Choctawhatchee River basin in Florida. Photographic evidence is still lacking, but Geoff Hill and his team have made more than a dozen sightings and recorded hundreds of distinct sounds associated only with the bird. Hill is highly regarded in the ornithological community, so we're betting the photographic evidence will be forthcoming soon, even with all the obstacles to obtaining it.

2. Another offering from Cyberthrush here.

3. Mennill's CLO connection:

Dan conducted post-doctoral research in the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University and in the Department of Biological Sciences at Auburn University.

Another interview with Hill

Here.

Some of what Hill said (please let me know if I've made any errors in transcription):

This bird has a simple behavioral pattern--stay away from people. And every time we've spotted 'em, they've been moving away from us. So it's not like in a panic; they just have really good ears and eyes, and when people approach them, they move away. And that makes it really hard to get a picture of 'em.

Need another break?

After the recent deluge of "Ivory-bill" news and discussion, you may want to temporarily escape by watching a nice children's show with the young people in your life.

I recommend this one.

You had me at "flapping of duck wings"

Excerpts from the Cornell website here (the bold font is mine):

“Tyler got a clear look at a female ivory-bill through his binoculars, flying through the forest,” Hill says. “And when Tyler got a clear look—Tyler’s the best field ornithologist I’ve ever been out with—I would trust his sightings better than anybody in North America.”

I wouldn't.

The Florida crew found 20 cavities they say might have been made by an ivory-bill. Fitzpatrick thinks the cavity data are some of the most interesting: “I’m most excited about the fact that they have woodpecker cavity holes, several of which appear to be reasonably fresh and are bigger than the excavations typically made by Pileated Woodpeckers. There’s nothing else that would be digging those except a larger woodpecker. The cavities are the right shape and size and they’re placed in the right spots,” Fitzpatrick says.

Today's links

1. From Rick Wright here.

2. From Blue Crab Boulevard here.

3. Fitzpatrick sidling towards the exit?

I'd linked to this article before, but an alert reader pointed out an interesting quote (the bold font is mine):

John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who has led the search for the woodpecker in Arkansas, hailed the Florida find as strong evidence.

"It's tantalizing, it's suggestive, it's not conclusive, but in the aggregate, evidence is strong that the bird is there," Fitzpatrick said in a telephone interview.

He was sympathetic to Hill's problems in getting a photograph, and acknowledged widespread doubts about the bird's existence.

"I've been accused of being a Bigfoot searcher," Fitzpatrick said, referring to the mythical beast of American folklore. "I just believe that it is a very important priority for us to search all of the places where this bird may be hanging on, and once and for all find out where they still exist, if they do."

Update: Lest we forget, check out what Fitzpatrick was allegedly saying as recently as last month.

4. Excerpts from this Walton Sun article (the bold font is mine):

...The team’s evidence that the Ivory-billed woodpecker exists here in Florida was 30 times greater than what was offered in the Arkansas sighting, Davis said...Last year’s announcement brought hundreds of birders to Brinkley, said Sandra Kimmer, of the Brinkley Chamber of Commerce.
From a chamber perspective, Kimmer said, “I loved the attention it brought to our wonderful beautiful swamp where the bird might have been. Everybody loves a comeback story, and it was a comeback story.”

Note the past tense used by "Kimmer".

5. From the Cornell Daily Sun:

Finally, this week researchers admitted the Ivory Billed Woodpecker discovered by Cornellians recently is VILLAINOUSLY missing. No one’s really seen in it in the last year – oops? Their funding has been cut because they have not yet found a nest. However, ornithologists in Collegetown believe that the large, amorphous structures outside Sheldon Court might just be the long lost nests. That, or Big Bird’s Play Pen.

6. More baloney from Tim Gallagher here.

For example, did Gallagher really tell the audience that he and a "colleague" were dressed in camouflage when they saw their "Ivory-bill"?

Note that in Gallagher's "The Grail Bird", there is a picture of Sparling/Gallagher/Harrison taken on 2/27/04 "shortly after they saw an ivory-billed woodpecker". No one is wearing camo.

Rebutting Hill et al

In a previous comment thread, Methinks wrote:

PS: For Tom, maybe for another thread...Who will publish a response to Hill et al in ACE. Those namby-pamby ornithologist types better do it this time...last time they left up to a rag-tag gang of bird artists, untenured Ph D.'s, id experts, and Bird Observatory Directors (I mean that in the nicest possible way fellas).

I think these guys have done their service, because without their rebuttal, we'd still be knee-deep in double-knocky sounds and teary-eyed interns from Brinkley. But who is going to rebut Professor Hill, Harold Hill.

On the surface, the "response" process on the fledgling Avian Conservation and Ecology journal looks quick and easy--check out this link. An excerpt:

We welcome comments from readers that summarize data or experiences, or that review other papers or books that amplify the original article. Comments will be accepted only if factual, thoughtful, and substantive. If opinions are included, they must move the discussion forward. The Editor-in-Chief who oversaw the peer-review of this article will act as the moderator of all responses. If a response is accepted for publication, it will be linked to the original article under the heading "Responses to this Article".

A response may be of any length, and may include additional materials such as figures or tables. Short responses (under 250 words) will be reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief of the original article. Longer responses and those that include additional material will be subject to more rigorous screening. All responses that are accepted for publication will appear as separate articles, but will be cross-linked to the original article.

Also note this editorial. An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

By bringing this paper to the attention of avian ecologists and conservationists, ACE-ÉCO is participating in the scientific process of hypothesis generation and evaluation. As is the nature of our business, readers will decide for themselves. The online, open access format of the journal readily permits dialogue on this topic, and we invite readers to submit comments. For now, we are prepared to embrace the uncertainty presented by the evidence in Hill et al. Time, and rigorous testing, will be the ultimate judge.

I think ACE-ECO (on Hill et al) has an opportunity to seriously outperform Science (on Fitz et al). Both journals published papers detailing flimsy Ivory-bill evidence, but Science treated it as "proof" while ACE-ECO at least acknowledged it was "not proof".

In the handling of rebuttals/responses, I think ACE-ECO has the opportunity to run rings around Science. Note this disturbing text from this Nemesio/Jackson/Rodrigues paper (PDF):

In spite of submitting it twice, our reply was neither acknowledged nor published by the journal [Science], thus avoiding the presentation of our contradictory opinion and, we feel, violating a basic tenet of science.

I encourage all of you to submit responses to ACE-ECO (I may do this myself too).

If you do submit a response, please let us know how it goes. I wonder how the mainstream media will cover responses as they are published.

Interview with Geoff Hill

Now available as Segment 1 here. It's about 32 minutes long, starting at the 9:45 mark.

Hill describes Brian Rolek as "the least experienced birder in our group". On their first day in their super-secret 2-square-mile spot, not long after Cornell's Arkansas announcement, Brian saw an Ivory-bill. Later, on the first day scouting another spot 10 miles to the north, Brian saw another Ivory-bill.

To me, Hill comes across as your nice-guy neighbor who's just not overly-endowed with common sense.

Geoff--for months on end, in a 2-square-mile area, people keep glimpsing Ivory-bills; people (and the ARUs) keep hearing Ivory-bills; yet no one ever gets a good look at a perched Ivory-bill?! Does that really make any sense to you?

Hill talks about his five-person team, but note that his web site talks about 14 visitors to the area:

Through July 2006, nine of fourteen visitors who spent more than 48 hours at the site detected Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

I'd like to know more about those other visitors and what they "detected".

Today's links

1. Some interesting stuff is on the Nokuse Plantation website.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

The evidence reported by Auburn University this week from the Choctawhatchee strongly indicates that a population of ivory-billed woodpeckers persists in at least one remote river swamp of northern Florida. This follows on the heels of the highly publicized 2005 discovery of at least one bird in Arkansas, and a widely accepted 1999 report of a pair of ivorybills in Louisiana. Researchers working completely independently have over a span of six years reported multiple sightings at three sites separated by hundreds of miles. Might it be possible that a few small populations of this secretive species are scattered throughout its historic range?

Some of the above text sounds uncomfortably Fishcrow-like to me.

2. Mary Scott has removed the "Nine pairs!!" stuff from her website. Note the prominent mention of Cyberthrush's site.

3. John Mariani again brings up a very relevant point here:

It's too bad that neither the Cornell or Auburn teams recorded and quantifed their misidentifications, if any. It would be interesting to know how often (if ever) Pileated Woodpeckers were initially identified as IBWOs.

4. Check out the cautious headline at the Audubon site here:

AUDUBON HOPEFUL THAT EVIDENCE OF IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKERS IN FLORIDA WILL LEAD TO CONFIRMATION

And check out this excerpt from this Audubon page (the bold font is mine):

We ask that you look at the accompanying pages that compare and describe these two species. If you remain convinced that you have seen an Ivory-billed Woodpecker you will need to take photographs of the bird.

5. A blog entry from Ontario is here.

6. WorldTwitch weighs in here.

7. Cyberthrush expounds on "simply documenting the species photographically" here.

8. Laura Erickson takes on the skeptics here.

As usual, she makes some great points. Can anyone out there name a single credible person who's skeptical of *any* of these reports of unphotographable Ivory-bills?

9. Here is a new Reuters story. Please read the whole thing.

"Rare woodpecker gets the bird from developers"

Article in the Miami Herald here.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

'And now I'm being accused of using the Ivory bill to stop the airport,' Hill said Wednesday. 'Honest to God, I had no knowledge of this. Until yesterday, I was living in an academic world. I read bird journals. I was just a biologist obsessed with finding evidence that this bird still existed.' Hill and his team said they had come across signs of the Ivory bill along the sleepy Choctawhatchee last year.

I fully believe everything that Hill says above.

To me, the bold text above is the most interesting part. When you're obsessed with finding Ivory-bill evidence, you're likely to find an abundance of it, even in search areas that haven't held Ivory-bills for many decades.

"What were they thinking?"

An anonymous source provided this assessment (Word format) of the flimsy Florida "Ivory-bill sightings".

Here is the (in)famous FieldNotes2006.pdf file.

More links

1. Some spin from The Ithaca Journal here.

2. Excerpts from an MSNBC story (the bold font is mine):

"On 41 occasions different team members ... heard that double knock; it's a sound the ivory-billed makes that no other bird makes," Auburn ornithologist Geoffrey Hill said
...
"I think people should be skeptical. I think they should demand clear photographic evidence. I might start to get skeptical myself thinking, 'I've seen this bird,' but how could I have seen a bird that it is impossible to photograph," he [Hill] said.

3. Don't worry, Arkansas! Just read this.

4. From this article (the bold font is mine):

Whether the Auburn sightings turn out to prove the existence of ivory-billed woodpeckers, [biologist Mike] Owen said, that possibility is exciting,

“It makes people say, ‘Wow, this thing refuses to die,’” Owen said. “It keeps conservation in the news, and anything that points toward conservation is a good thing.”

5. From this article:

Hill and two research assistants, Tyler Hicks and Brian Rolek, were paddling kayaks along the Choctawhatchee when suddenly Rolek saw a flash of wings and blurted out, "What was THAT?"
...
The news that the ivory bill might make its home near the airport site electrified the project's opponents.
...
"It's not a phantom," Hill said. "It's a vertebrate animal that lives in the forest. There are eggs, feathers, poop - DNA."

6. The Silence of the Listservs

The general birding listservs that I checked yesterday contained very little discussion of Hill's announcement. For example, Florida Birds had only one posting, with zero replies. I would describe the reaction at Birdchat as lukewarm at best.

7. CLO has published this short item labeled "Ivory-bill News from Florida". David Luneau calls it "Big News from Florida!!". The USFWS "IBW Updates" page still contains nothing dated after January 2006.

8. Never fear, Lammertink is here?

Excerpt from another ridiculous article in The Ithaca Journal:

...These latest sightings add fuel to Ithaca-based researcher and author Tim Gallagher's 2004 sighting, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's research along the Cache River in Arkansas.

Despite Gallagher's initial sighting and extensive searches in the last two years, no Ivory-billed Woodpeckers have actually been seen in Arkansas.

The Lab of Ornithology has been in on the Florida research, sending woodpecker expert Martjan Lammertink to help, said the lab's director, John Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

“He looked at the site and was impressed by the size of the roost cavities (in tree trunks) and by the foraging signs,” Fitzpatrick said.

9. A blog posting here. Warning: it appears to contain sarcasm.

10. Don Hendershot has a new article here. He even provides some song lyrics!

11. An excerpt from this article, datelined Little Rock:

For people in Brinkley, the town that has attracted thousands of birders because of its proximity to the Cache River wildlife refuge, the news from Florida wasn't discouraging, said Sandra Kemmer, the executive director of the Brinkley Chamber of Commerce.

Kemmer said the news confirmed what people there have known for years: that the ivory-billed woodpecker lives in their swamps.

"I think the more places a bird shows up, the more likelihood we have ours around here," Kemmer said. "The news just nailed it for me. If there's more of them out there then you know ours made it."

Notes on Jon Andrew's LSU presentation

Donna Dittmann attended Jon Andrew's presentation at LSU on 9/20/06. She was kind enough to email me the following information:

I attended the Baton Rouge Audubon Society evening presentation by Jon Andrew, chief of the SE Region USFWS and Chairperson of the Steering Committee for the Recovery Team. The talk’s announcement was titled “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Update” and the teaser on the meeting’s notice was “What has happened since the announced confirmed sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker near the Cache Rive in Arkansas? Is there a possibility that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker will someday be seen again in Louisiana? Come and learn the latest information.”

I was a little tardy arriving and sat down just as BRAS Program Chair, Charles Fryling introduced Andrew. Andrew’s title slide ‘Recovery of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in SE Arkansas’ indicated the much narrower focus of his talk, the bulk of which consisted of the rediscovery events, and a compilation and support of evidence of the rediscovery. Specifically, review of the Luneau video (a brief analysis including flight characters, measurements, and the 6 pixel bird), audio evidence, and the flurry of ’04 sightings. He mentioned that not everyone agreed with the identification of the bird in the video, and in that context mentioned Tom Nelson (twice) and David Sibley (three times) but said that he/USFWS has to manage based on the assumption that IBWOs are there. He touched on potential user conflicts, such as duck hunters versus birders, but concluded that these did not really pose a threat. There was little detail about recovery efforts: one slide touched on modeling and assessment and Andrew indicated that the draft recovery plan was going to be released in October ’06 for public input and a final plan would be issued in Spring ‘07. More emphasis was placed on IBWO impact on ecotourism in Brinkley and the importance of community outreach … I took notes in anticipation of acquiring new information (anyone actually interested, I’d be happy to email you a copy), but for the most part, if you attended hoping to hear new details of the ‘05-06 AR field season (there is more information on the Cornell’s Webpage), results of other recent searches and recovery efforts for Ivory-billeds, or whether they may be present in Louisiana or elsewhere, you would have been disappointed.

Donna L. Dittmann
St. Gabriel, Louisiana
ddittma AT lsu.edu

Dittmann also has several pages of more detailed notes, which I personally found very interesting. As noted above, you can email Dittman to request a copy.

A letter authored by Mark Robbins

Mark Robbins has given me permission to post this letter (Word format), dated March 16, 2006.

Robbins sent me the above Word doc along with the following text:

Attached is a document that was produced the day before the Sibley et al. article came out. It was sent to a number of people on 17 March 2006, including the IBW Recovery team leader….he denied our request to share it with the rest of the recovery team. You can share this with whomever.

Gallagher's wife weighs in

Here.

This guy is not so impressed.

"Campephilus nonphotographibus"

From the Birdchick's comment section:

Larry S said...

I propose a new name for this obvious sub-speices of the IBWO.
This new sub-species is
"Campephilus nonphotographibus"

USFWS on the fence

The USFWS swallowed Cornell's evidence hook, line, and sinker.

Their response to Auburn's similar evidence is much less enthusiastic.

"The world is more skeptical now"

NPR covers the story here.

Cornell's flimsy evidence was remarkably similar to Auburn's flimsy evidence, but NPR's coverage is starkly different this time around.

The "commuters forced to pull over because of tears of joy" problem should be minimal today.

Hill's paper now online

Here.

Please also see the editorial authored in part by Jeffrey Walters.

Hill's IBWO web page is back online here.

An excerpt from this Huntsville Times Press-Register article:

"We've got bad video," the Auburn team's lead researcher, Geoff Hill, said of footage his team shot in Florida. "We decided bad video is worse than no video, and it distracts from what is our good evidence."

Bobby Harrison weighs in here:

"I think it's wonderful," said Harrison, a wildlife photographer and instructor at Oakwood College. "We've got birds in two locations now."

More articles

1. An excerpt from this Toronto Star story (the bold font is mine):

Struggling on a shoestring budget and battling alligators and water moccasin snakes, the team also recorded hundreds of distinctive vocal calls and rapping used by the woodpeckers to communicate, found a score of recent tree-nesting cavities of the right size and identified dozens of the bird's unique chisel marks on bark.

"I think they're all up and down the river," said University of Windsor professor Dan Mennill, a 32-year-old biologist specializing in bird sounds and team co-leader.

2. From the Cornell Daily Sun:

“This was not a good year for sightings,” Swarthout said. The Lab of Ornithology has different plans for its ivory-billed searching next year. Swarthout said that the searching this season, which will run from Dec. 4 to the end of April 2007, will be smaller than last year’s. There will be four full-time staffers for Cornell’s search in Arkansas, two technicians and another team member, as well as six to ten volunteers. The past search season had 22 full-time staffers, 112 volunteers and 10 agency/NGO personnel.
What accounts for this difference? Money, according to Prof. Kenneth Rosenberg, ornithology.

“Since we haven’t come up with a bird or a nest, the number of donations we’ve received are reduced,” he said.

However, researchers are still holding out for an ivory-billed sighting. Prof. John Fitzpatrick, ornithology, believes that “this year we’re armed with two and a half years worth of experience. We can target things much better than before – we can target areas we haven’t looked at before and search again areas in which we’re most likely to find an ivory-billed.”

Rosenberg added that this year’s searchers will have to be “more efficient, given the reduced chances of seeing something due to the smaller search team.”

3. In the fledgling "Avian Conservation and Ecology", where Hill et al's "publication" will appear, this Ivory-bill essay appears in Volume 1, Number 1.

Note that one of the authors is Jeffrey R. Walters, one of the peer reviewers of Cornell's original 2005 Ivory-bill paper. More on Walters is here.

Mennill's IBWO site now online

Here.

Update 1: A University of Windsor press release has been posted here.

An excerpt:

The University of Windsor/Auburn University team recorded 14 sightings of Ivory-Bills and identified more than 300 sounds matching historical recordings and descriptions of the bird. As well, the group found 20 nesting cavities in the appropriate size range for Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers, and identified trees bearing the distinctive feeding marks of the long-sought woodpecker. Their findings will appear in the new online journal, Avian Conservation and Ecology - Ecologie et Conservation des Oiseaux.

The grapevine says that Hill et al tried to get their stuff published at several other venues, including Nature, but they were turned down.

Update 2: A long article is now available at the Anniston Star. Please read the whole thing.

New York Times article

Here.

An excerpt:

Dr. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell lab, who had consulted with Dr. Hill about the findings before publication, said, “They’ve got a lot of intriguing evidence.”

“This is a perfect illustration of the fact that we need to get a multigroup multistate, comprehensive range-wide search for this bird undertaken,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.

David Sibley, author of “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” a critic of the report on the Arkansas bird, called the Florida report “intriguing”, but said it “really provides very little evidence for the existence of Ivory-bills there.”

Hill's IBWO web site now online

Check this out.

Update 1: It looks like the site was taken down not long after I posted the link above. Here's a tantalizing one-sentence excerpt:

At present, our best tangible evidence for the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River is recordings of double knocks and kent calls.

Update 2: More tantalizing text from the site:

If we encounter birders in our study area, we will ask them to leave and suggest other areas to search...If birders crowd into one spot, ivorybills will be driven out of that area...
---
Seven observers among the twelve who visited the site for at least 48 hours between May 2005 and April 2006 heard either double knocks or kent calls, and observers detected these signature sounds of ivorybills on 41 separate occasions during this period including as many as 50 kent calls and 45 double knocks during single encounters. Kent calls or double knocks were heard in May and December 2005 and January, February, March, April, May, June, and July 2006.

Update 3:

The site claimed that Brian Rolek had no fewer than 23 sound detections and 10 sightings...It also said that through July 2006, 9 of 13 visitors who spent more than 48 hours at the site detected Ivory-billed Woodpeckers...The "evidence" was collected in a small search area roughly one mile wide and two miles long.

Update 4: Fishcrow meets Hill--see related Birdforum posts here and here.

Fishcrow on Wikipedia again?

Yesterday someone added this text to the Wikipedia Ivory-billed Woodpecker page:

In September of 2006, a biologist will announce the discovery of multiple pairs of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Florida. Scientists working completely independently have now reported multiple sightings at three sites separated by hundreds of miles. The picture is starting to become clear. The species is extremely difficult to observe, but it is likely that small but interconnected populations are scattered about its range. This hypothesis is consistent with the pattern of reports over the years and with the low probability of survival for small and isolated populations.

The "contributor's" IP address was 128.160.53.74--a lot of 128.160 IP addresses are listed here, and those sites seem to be related to this one.

A previous Fishcrow/Wikipedia post is here.

Grab bag

1. From a particularly clueless Knoxville News Sentinel article:

Understandably, this news was initially met with doubt and disbelief by ornithologists. However, after a sound recording was made available and reviewed, many altered, or at least relaxed, their positions.

"We were very skeptical of the first published reports and thought that the previous data were not sufficient to support this startling conclusion," said Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University. "But the thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct."

Not everyone shares Prum's optimism, and the reported sightings are a source of debate, discussion and speculation. Of particular concern is the question of whether a mating pair exists.

This article should be corrected with some more recent quotes from Prum. (I've just emailed the author about this).

2. From another Knoxville News Sentinel article today:

Hoose gave five talks over three days, with speaking to audiences of young children as well as in college classrooms. All were free to anyone interested in attending.

When asked his opinion of any skepticism surrounding the alleged Arkansas spotting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Hoose responded that he was cautious because of its close resemblance to the pileated woodpecker.

"I would like more and clearer evidence," he said.

But he was very confident and positive when he added, "I think it's certain that (the scientists who made the discovery) were qualified to make the call."

3. Elliot Swarthout is scheduled to speak about the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker tonight in Ithaca.

4. Check out this new Ivory-bill job posting.

"Essentially the same evidence that Cornell has"

Here.

Jim Fitzpatrick speaks

From an article here:

Fitzpatrick recently saw a bird species believed to be long extinct. Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the Carpenter St. Croix Valley Nature Center in Hastings, Minnesota, was on a recent research expedition on the Pearl River between Louisiana and Mississippi when he made a confirmed sighting of the ivory billed woodpecker. He is one of only seven people who together made the first confirmed sighting of the rare bird since before the end of World War Two.

"How the bird survived is the $64,000 question," he said. "The speculation is that while all of the bird's habitat was being removed, parts of the ivory billed woodpecker population were driven into the heart of the big thickets in Texas. There, away from people, it could have been breeding for decades. The last confirmed sighting before the trip I went on was in 1944."

Big problems with ARU "Ivory-bills"

See Birdforum posts here and here.

Harrison's new robotic Ivory-bill decoys

An excerpt from this story:

Harrison's new decoys are about 15 percent smaller than the ones he made before. Those were big birds, as big as the largest-known ivory-bills. David Ligon of the University of New Mexico said they were too big for the job, which was to taunt territorial ivory-bills into coming down and driving away the interlopers.

He was right, Harrison said, sounding mildly rueful that he hadn't thought of it himself.

"A bird is not going to pick a fight with something it's not going to win," he said.

So these four - there will be two male and two female; the females don't have the red-crests - are smaller. A wire snaking from the bird to a battery pack will be disguised as a vine, he said.