New letter to Science by Sibley et al.

A new letter to Science by Sibley et al. is now available here (not for free). Here's a paragraph dealing with the photomontage saga:

A photomontage (fig. 1B in the Response) that superficially matches video field 33.3 combines part of the foreshortened wing of an ivory-billed woodpecker specimen with an image of trees. About 60% of the black forewing (~13% of the wing length) was omitted, as if hidden behind a tree (see figure), contradicting earlier reconstructions (1). By this new reconstruction, with foreshortened wing and hidden “wrist,” the putative “wrist-to-tailtip” measurements in (1) would have underestimated the true distance; yet, those measurements matched “the upper range for ivorybilled woodpecker” (1). Extrapolation suggests that the true measurement would be too large for an ivory-billed woodpecker. This undermines the plausibility of various reconstructions of posture—“perched” (2) or “begins to take flight” (1)—and consequently the claim that field 33.3 shows white on the bird’s dorsal wing surface. We maintain that this white patch represents the underside of a spread wing.

Here's a paragraph from Fitz et al.'s response:

We presented a photomontage to illustrate that a lateral view of an opening wing of an ivory-billed woodpecker launching off a tree trunk can produce a black-and-white pattern similar to that in field 33.3 of the Luneau video. We did not intend the montage to be a precise match for wing angles and body position of the bird in the video, because (i) these parameters cannot be determined precisely from the video, and (ii) no photographs or mounts are available to illustrate an ivory-billed woodpecker wing as it is opened during launch. Even if field 33.3 does depict the underside of the bird’s wing as proposed by Sibley et al., the absence of a broad black border formed by dark primary and secondary feathers on the distal and posterior portions of the wing renders it inconsistent with pileated woodpecker.