An excerpt (the bold font is mine):
David Kulivan, a wildlife biology grad student and turkey hunter, has reported seeing ivory-billed woodpeckers on the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries-owned Pearl River Wildlife Management Area on two separate occasions: April 1 and December 27, 1999. Since that time there have been several expeditions to look for the birds in the area. Some have reported hearing "intriguing" things, but needless to say, no confirmation has been forth-coming. Now that the news of the report has filtered out around the country, various expeditions have been organized by out-of-state avid birders as well...(Note that if you scroll down at the link above, you'll see that Mary Scott offered a free T-shirt to anyone who photographed an Ivory-bill.)
Kulivan's first alleged sighting was on April Fool's Day 1999, when he was an undergraduate student in forestry at LSU. Some snippets from Gallagher:
...They vocalized continuously, making a sound he had never heard before...The remarkable thing is that he had a 35mm camera in his game bag, which he had hoped to use to take pictures of his first turkey. But he was so much in shock, he didn't think to get it out and take some pictures...He watched the birds for at least ten minutes...He sat on the story for almost two weeks. Then one day after class he approached a professor, Vernon Wright, and said he needed to talk. He laid out the story before the astonished Wright, who told him to write up his notes immediately.Were those notes ever submitted to any bird records committee, and were they ever made public?
At this link, it says that Kulivan's first sighting was "within
earshot of a four-lane highway". Some excerpts (the bold font is mine):
...The birds were but 30 feet from him at one point. He watched them for about 10 minutes before they flew, calling as they left...“There were saturation-bombing searches out there for the next few days” after Kulivan’s report, Dr. Remsen said. “The people looking came up with zilch. People saw big woodpeckers. They heard stuff. It was like this fever. But nobody ever got to study a bird.The description in bold is interesting in light of this sentence from Tanner's book (page 62):
I have heard Ivory-bills give this call as one flew in to join its mate, but it is rarely that one will make any call when on the wing.Here is a February 2000 piece written by Guy Luneau, David Luneau's brother.
Some excerpts:
He’s [Kulivan's] not a birder, but he says he knows birds...On Saturday, February 19 while we were there, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department and the Natural Heritage Program led a widely publicized, official search for the bird. How many people showed up to help? 38. THIRTY-EIGHT??? What’s up with that? Why not 138? Or 238? You’ve got the most reliable sighting of an "extinct" bird in the past 50 years, the bird that "every birder" dreams about seeing, and only THIRTY-EIGHT people show up? Furthermore, the Pearl River WMA is probably more road-accessible and closer to a population center than any of the other WMAs and NWRs in Louisiana!...Overall, in reading these accounts from the Kulivan era, it looks like a time of great "Ivory-bill innocence" compared to today, when we've seen a number of recent, high-profile false dawns. Check out this account of a single kent-like call heard, circa 2000.
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2 comments:
"He’s [Kulivan's] not a birder"
"You’ve got the most reliable sighting of an "extinct" bird in the past 50 years"
The first comment refutes the second
Rumor has it that Kulivan was heard boasting of his aspirations of "finding presumably extinct/extirpated species" such as IBWO, Red Wolf, etc. versus his contradictory claim that he didn't report right away because he "didn't understand the significance of the IBWO sighting," or, also contradictorily, "he knew nobody would believe him." Another good pair of quotes was that he had the camera in his bag but that he either "forgot it was there" vs. "he didn't reach for it because he might scare away the birds."
Regarding "LA records committee v. Kulivan," the committee did come into possession of his notes and unanimously considered the record unacceptable without accompanying hard evidence (e.g., the sight report was considered not to be any more credible than other LA sight records over the past 60 years).
Again, this record would not have gone anywhere if Remsen hadn't declared it "credible."
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