There's a related update at the ACONE site.
Update: Another related article is here.
Yet another article is here.
An excerpt:
"There is no credible evidence that the North American subspecies of Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis survived after the demise of the Singer Tract birds in the 1940s after the last substantial patch of old-growth habitat was destroyed," stated WorldTwitch.com, a birding web site run by John Wall. "What can only be another routine case of misidentification of the common Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus in good Pileated but poor Ivorybill habitat in Arkansas has been promoted as the latest Ivorybill 'rediscovery'."
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2 comments:
According to the ACONE site, funds from the NSF Robotics and Robust Intelligence Program are being used to attempt to get an image of an IBWO.
So is NSF to be added to the list of Audubon, Cornell, TNC that thinks getting in on sexy but laughable research will improve their public image?
What next? NSF funding for cameras to monitor the Anna Nicole Smith estate? There are real conservation issues and real news stories out there. The fact that one can entertain the American public with the lowest common denominator is not an excuse for ignoring the things that that actually matter (or exist).
"The program knows...that the ivory-billed woodpecker flies 20 to 40 miles per hour, so anything outside that range is deleted," said Dezhen Song...who worked with Ni Qin...on the software.
I wonder how the engineers will control for distance and angle of trajectory of subject relative to the camera. A really close bird can fly across the field of view in a flash, but a distant bird might take, let me think, 4 seconds maybe? Perhaps Deshen & Ni will count the number of white pixels per frame and consider the counts' trend during the clip. Maybe something good will come out of this. I'm just hoping it'll be better than the breakfast "juice" of my teenage years (1965-74).
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