An excerpt:
As our Ivory-billed Woodpecker search enters March, we’re still working to get a clear photo or video. I’m encouraged that we had two sightings in the past two weeks by members of our search team and the listening stations continue to record putative double knocks and kents in the same few square kilometers of forest where the sightings occurred and where team members have recently heard kents and double knocks in life. We are about 2/5 of the way through our search (most of the search crew stays until the end of May) and only about ¼ of the way through our camera deployments, so we still have plenty of time to get a definitive photo.
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8 comments:
Those darn birds are there, and in a fairly small area, too. They are simply undetectable by cameras, hand held or automatic. I fear we are dealing with a tear in the space/time continuum.
I can't say anything about the double knocks but I personally witnessed kent calls (and I mean - stop you in your tracks - kent calls) being done by blue jays in the Choctawhatchee River. If I had not seen the jays I would have been sure that I had an 'encounter'. Therefore, to me, kent calls in the Choctawhatchee are essentially meaningless.
This is rich:
"(These would be “A” cavities in the Lab of Ornithology classification system but we give each cavity a score of 1 to 30.)"
So Cornell basically has 3 categories (A, B, and C). Hill decides thats just not enough. He has some system where their degree of IBWO-ness can be rated into 30 categories. HA! All this presumably based on the 4 or so known IBWO cavities in museum collections. Too funny!
I'd love to see the "details" of those "sightings". Since Hill didn't trumpet them as he did the Hicks "sighting", you can bet that they are pretty lame.
So all the searching can turn up is a bunch of A-holes. Well, we mightn't have said it like that, but if the shoe fits...
anon 6:57 said... If I had not seen the jays I would have been sure that I had an 'encounter'.
It's interesting that nearly all of Hill's calls of interest are single notes. How come there is never a series? Are Blue Jays doing kent-like calls and then doing more identifiable calls being culled out by the grad students? Have they attempted to compare sonograms of Blue Jays in the Choc to their putative kents?
Regarding IBWO cavities, check out the one in the "newly found Cuban IBWO photos." Seems rather round. Or, maybe the Cuban birds preferred round holes versus oval or irregular holes?
If blue jays are making kent calls along the Choc, then what is it they are imitating? Are blue jays doing this in other areas? Could this be a supporting piece of evidence that IBWO's may be in there?
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