Cyberthrush on the CLO report

Here.

Gerstner on the need for stealth and/or speed

Here.

CLO's '05-'06 Final Report

Now available here.

One excerpt:

Notably, on 13 December 2005 Sharon Stiteler, an official Cornell volunteer and experienced birder flushed and sighted a large woodpecker, noting white trailing edges in the wings.

If Sharon actually believes in her own sighting, how can we explain her recent comments here?

A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism-OT

Here.

Update:

Welcome, Birdforum readers!

If you've enjoyed exploring the shockingly bad science of the Ivory-bill fiasco, you may also enjoy exploring the details of the current global warming debate. There are many parallels, and interestingly enough, Don Kennedy plays Don Kennedy in both cases.

For some details of the skeptical viewpoint on global warming alarmism, check out this posting.

Also see this blog post.

The key global warming question (off topic)

Regarding the global warming debate, I would particularly like to see the results of a very simple, hypothetical poll. Ask the top 500 climatologists/meteorologists in the world which of the two graphs below best represents their view of scientific truth:


(Before doing the poll, it would be best to provide a second graph that had exactly the same scale and geographical coverage as the first).

My prediction is that given these two choices, the vast majority would choose the bottom graph. (That first graph is the much-derided "hockey stick graph").

Note that these two graphs represent starkly different views of reality. The first one depicts a world with historically stable temperatures, but now possibly driven to imminent apocalypse because of mankind's activities. If this one's true, then "the sky is falling!" rhetoric would be quite justified, in my view.

The second one depicts a world with historically significant temperature fluctuations very unlikely to be caused by man. If that one's true, mankind likely has no choice but to adapt to large future climate changes.

Again, some fascinating background on the top graph is found in this Monckton article.

Update--Note what Monckton wrote in his second Sunday Telegraph article here (the bold font is mine):

The views of 200 readers who emailed me are in the link above. About a third are scientists, including well-known climatologists and a physicist who confirmed my calculations. Some advise governments.

Nearly all condemn the "consensus". Most feel that instead of apologising, the UN has misled them, especially by using the defective "hockey-stick" temperature graph.

If you have comments, I ask that you keep them very tightly focused on the graphs above.

"A meteorologist weighs in" (off topic)

Here.

The 20% rule

Cyberthrush writes:

That Ivory-bills could NOT survive without bark beetle larvae, without large first-growth trees, and on less than 6 square miles simply has never been shown, and is actually quite a leap of logic (Ivory-bills, being 15-20% larger than Pileateds, could likely make do with trees 20% larger than those used by Pileateds, and such trees are plentiful.)

Update from Cornell

Here.

Update: A reader highlighted this quote (the bold font is mine):

"We'll never know if ivory-bills persist outside of Arkansas unless we undertake systematic searches of key areas, a task that should have been done decades ago," said Ron Rohrbaugh, director of the Lab's Ivory-billed Woodpecker Research Project.

The global warming debate (off topic)

I've started to do some serious reading on the global warming debate, and I'm finding it absolutely fascinating.

If you're interested, here are some related links:

1. Christopher Monckton (11/5/06; first of two Sunday Telegraph articles): Climate chaos? Don't believe it.

References and detailed calculations here (PDF).

Followup emails to Lord Monckton (PDF; 77 pages of detailed questions and answers)

2. Monckton (11/12/06; second of two articles): Wrong Problem. Wrong Solution.

3. George Monbiot's response to Monckton (11/14/06): This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong

4. Monckton's response to Monbiot (11/14/06): At least he spelled my name right

5. Al Gore's response to Monckton (11/19/06): At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation

6. Monckton's response to Gore (11/21/06): A Science-based response to Al Gore’s Global Warming Commentary in London’s Sunday Telegraph, 19 November 2006. (PDF)

Jackson to speak Dec. 12 in Florida

Some details are here.

Mennill lecture last night

A few details are here.

Update: Here's a related poster (PDF).

Time flies

As of this fall, Geoff Hill was publicly confident that his team would capture definitive proof of a living Ivory-bill this search season.

Review an excerpt from this article (the bold font is mine):

"All woodpeckers bang on trees," he said, but no other makes a double knock like the ivory-billed.

Hill said it is hard to catch the bird on camera because it hides behind trees when it lands, but it's not impossible. He plans to use time-lapse cameras on future trips. By expanding his team to as many as 14 members and using up to 30 cameras, purchased with state, federal and private funding, he ensures success.

"I saw it and seeing is believing," he said. "We will get a picture of it."

... and an excerpt from this article (the bold font is mine):

In December, the Windsor-Auburn team plans a major expedition to nail the identification, by training automatic cameras at promising tree cavities, carrying high-quality video gear, using remote listening posts to quickly find Ivory-bill hot spots and dispatching as many as 20 field investigators instead of the lonely two students who camped there this past winter and spring.

"All those excuses will be gone," said Geoffrey Hill, the Auburn University ornithologist and bird feather expert who launched the search in May 2005.

Time marches on, and now mid-March is only 100 days away.

At some point relatively soon, even Hill has got to shift his thinking from anticipating success to explaining failure.

If the search fails (as it's virtually certain to do), how will Hill handle it? Will he go with the ever-popular "the birds must have moved or died", or will he go claim that the population of Ivory-bills is still there but he needs another year of funding to get a photograph?

It would be incredibly refreshing if Hill were to just admit that Ivory-bills were probably NOT present in his search area over the last few years.

By the way, it appears that even Cyberthrush is already starting to explain away the upcoming failure of this U.S. search season:

So much habitat in need of searching (maybe 8000-14000 sq. miles)... and yet many are already saying they'll give up on the species if this limited search season goes unsuccessful. Luckily, real field science doesn't operate on arbitrary timetables nor armchair analysis, but depends on those hands-on few willing and able to do the toilsome, on-the-ground work necessary, however long it takes.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article

Here.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

Laurie Fenwood, the ivorybilled woodpecker coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast region, said that state and federal officials met in South Carolina’s Congaree National Park in August to try to come up with a rating system to determine where the bird is most likely to have survived.

Fenwood said that large, undisturbed areas of bottomland hardwoods along rivers would be good candidates for searching. Areas of historical and recently reported sightings also would be logical places to look.

Although she said that some areas may have few reported sightings, “if people believe something has been extinct, they don’t tend to look for it,” Fenwood said.

How much the service will spend on the search is still being determined, she said. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service spent about $225,000 on the Arkansas search and about $350,000 on searches in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

The service expects to have a recovery plan, with an emphasis on Arkansas’ Big Woods, to the public by the summer.

“This is a preliminary plan and can be informed by what we may learn this search season,” Fenwood said.

Still questioning all those Harrison naked-eye sightings?

If you're still not completely comfortable with all of Bobby Harrison's naked-eye glimpses of flying presumed-extinct birds, this paragraph (from page 34 of The Grail Bird) may not help:

Bobby [Harrison] is the kind of guy who does bizarre things that crack me up--like wearing only one contact lens, so he can have one eye for distance and the other for close-up vision, or spitting into his hand and putting the hand to his eye to lubricate his contact lens. "You know, Bobby, they have a special solution you can buy for that," I told him once. "Yeah, but this is just as good and the price is better," he said.

An error-ridden article

Here.

A short, disappointing Choctawhatchee search

Here.

An excerpt:

We did not see or hear any Ivorybills and furthermore, we found the habitat to be largely unsuitable for IBWO.

Fitz"patrick" to resurface

He'll be speaking next week at a Houston Audubon meeting on (I kid you not) "How Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and Other Birds are Helping to Save the World".

Details here.

"Intriguing" Pileated video

Quite a few Pileated Woodpecker videos are now on YouTube.

I thought this one in particular was a bit interesting.

Given a low-quality Pileated video like that, I think it would be quite easy to create a frenzy among the believers formerly known as the BirdForum People.

Someone could release a carefully selected clip and maybe some carefully selected stills. (Of course, the accompanying Pileated audio wouldn't be provided.)

The low quality of the released images is the key--as a general rule, if people can distinguish the bird's head from its tail without your "help", the quality is probably too high.

A lot of "suggestive of Ivory-bill!" comments would inevitably result, along the lines of these (sorry, Julie!) from the Fishcrow site: