An excerpt:
The technicians have isolated many kent calls and double knocks over the last three weeks and they have shared these with Geoff and Karan and Justyn and the rest of the field team in Florida. In the coming week, we will carefully assess and measure these detections. Our field team had two sightings in my absence, but we still haven't obtained a clear photograph or video. I hope that our ongoing recordings will help us to locate the birds as their expected nesting season progresses.As a side note, someone "in Dan Mennill's lab" provided some thoughts here a few months ago.
An excerpt:
Part of the reason they can get recordings but not pictures relates to the fact that they set out passive listening stations that do the recording. The birds are likely to be at least 40feet up in the air, perched on the side of the tree opposite to the researchers and therefore hard to see at the best of times.
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14 comments:
Dear Tom:
I've enjoyed your blog for some time now. Originally I was drawn to it for your point of view. Your first person assesment of the evidence and your commitment to offering a legitimate way to explain the facts.
It seems like you've moved away from that. I'm OK with that, but I feel like you've lost touch with your original mission.
Here is the crisis I'm having. Reading Menil's update, and the various sighting accounts of the Choc searchers - to my mind has passed any kind of reasonable skepticism stance.
In the Lunneau video at least I could see the evidence and see where Cornell is clearly wrong.
But with this Choc group, I just don't have a way to explain or argue with the statements they are making. They are not claiming to have only fleeting glimpses anymore. Sure, I think it is NUTTY to say that the bird is 40 feet up on the other side of the tree. Sure I think they SHOULD be able to get a picture.
Perhaps they've just ground me down with their undying faith, but I feel like the Skeptic is no longer dealing with the claims they are making - but is instead devolving into mockery. Sure the mockery was fun, and it has its place, the moustache IBWO, the Ghillie suit days, the poetry, this was high brow mockery with an edge, the satire had meaning, and the meaning was built around a coherent case for the skeptic view.
Now I feel like we have lost our coherent case, we've entered the land of "bike brakes" and simple derision of these claims being made by the scientists.
Does my concern make sense to you? Care to comment? If the Choc searchers aren't "detecting" ivory billed, then are we just claiming what Fitz suggested in that recent Harvard Alum article, that this is all just a massive delusion?
What is the current state of The Ivory Billed Skeptic?
OK, tom, you don't have to answer that, I just took the time to listen to the Feb 11 sound file from Menill's account of Richard Martin's "kent encounter" - and it is total crap, no reason to think that isn't a blue jay. The cadence is totally blue jay and they can shove their spectograms up their ass.
There is no reason that you need to go back to refuting point by point their claims.
The fact is that they have got a lot of really young people out there in the woods and going against the party line is an invitation to leave the group. Therefore everyone believes.
End of story.
Please resume your mockery.
These guys are just pathetic.
Jesu christo anonymous, you just emotionally went through the last 3 years of this blog in what appears to be just 6 minutes.
Congratulations on catching up with us.
But this Hillcrow has just got everyone stumped. Is he a great practical jokester? As great as the master of them all, fishcrow?
Or the dumbest crackpot ever to set foot in this swampy fiasco?
Stay tuned.
The harmonics on these sounds looks like a nearly perfect match for the other supposed kent-like calls from Florida. In other words, they don't don't match known IBWO calls. Duration also seems longer than recorded IBWO calls.
It amazes me how, as the FL "evidence" piles up, some can become "more convinced" because the shear volume of "encounters" must be meaningful. Well, it's meaningful, all right, but in the opposite way, if you get my drift......
Like I said, this will go on for years, with accumulations of thousands of encounters, but never will we see an irrefutable photo.
That's because we are dealing with Twits and Gumbies (or is it Gumbys?).
I wonder what all these TBs would do if John, Kenny, and Van had the guts to actually say "we were wrong about the Luneau video and, therefore, none of the other Arkansas IBWO evidence can be considered reliable." Would they be torn limb from limb? Would all the TBs break down and cry and then crawl back into the woodwork?
That's because we are dealing with Twits and Gumbies (or is it Gumbys?).
It's definitely Gumbies.
"they have got a lot of really young people out there in the woods and going against the party line is an invitation to leave the group. Therefore everyone believes."
Sounds like the San Marcos revolutionaries
Some of the comments above seem determined only to reinforce the point of the first commentator… that this site is “no longer dealing with the claims they are making - but is instead devolving into mockery” and that we’ve entered a “land of "bike brakes" and simple derision.”
“Could be lot’s a stuff”, arguing from a sample of one, and of course “bicycle brakes” remain the benchmarks for serious engagement of the Mennill audio. What’s odd to me though, is that serious discussion of the Mennill audio shouldn’t be hard. Try something like this…
“Coots and moorhens are far better fits for the Mennill audio than jays, nuthatches, and deer. Like the Mennill audio, solitary still coots tend toward single notes… repeated commonly at irregular intervals… with considerable variation in pitch and volume. Coots have a little more “toot”, and less a little less “beep” in their voice than moorhens, and are more common in the region, so coot makes sense.” See it’s not that hard. Of course once you’ve started this you may have to acknowledge that coot sonograms don’t match Mennill sonograms any better than IBWO sonograms match Mennill sonograms, and that there still is probably more “beep” than “toot” in their voice overall. OK, even coot isn’t a great fit.
I guess that’s why no one engages the audio beyond “Could be lot’s a stuff.”…
pd
PD can't seem to get past the fact that audio evidence is not going to suffice. How many times has this been reiterated? If they use the audio as a tool to pin down the birds and then get photos, then that's great. But, gee, where ARE the photos. We will stop the mockery and derision when you stop deluding yourself.
"I guess that’s why no one engages the audio..."
That's just pure and utter baloney, PD.
This blog links to numerous stories of people hearing "Ivory-bills", only to find that the source was Blue Jays, rubbing tree branches, a distant oil well, etc etc etc.
A partial list of possible "kent" call sources is here .
"I guess that’s why no one engages the audio"
We're not talking about a Laterallus rail. Campephilus Woodpeckers are very easy to SEE when actually present as some of us, not including Cyberthrush, have experienced repeatedly firsthand.
"The lowland forests of eastern Peru are home to the Red-necked Woodpecker (Campephilus rubricollis), a sister species to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker."
Plausible sister species of our Ivory-billed Woodpecker were the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker and the less similar Imperial Woodpecker. Red-necked Woodpecker is obviously more distantly related to IBWO and is a cousin at best, not a sister. I wish Mennill and other top ornithologists discussed their work with greater rigor for the benefit of literal-thinking non-ornithologists like me who might otherwise miscontrue Red-necked Woodpecker as a plausible sister species of the IBWO.
I also would like Mennill to report the following ratio from his time in the Amazon:
clear prolonged views of RNWO: intriguing cavities possibly of RNWO: intriguing bark peeling possibly by RNWO: definite double knocks associated with good sightings: definite double knocks with the bird impossible to locate: intriguing double-knocky sounds
I suspect that the woodpeckers were more conspicuous than their possible cavities and peeled bark and that many if not most RNWO double knocks were obvious and associated with sightings, not "double-knocky" sounds at long intervals in the abscence of visible birds
pd, you ARE fooling yourself. Time after time in this whole fiasco "crazy" alternate explanations have proven to be be legit.
It's not up to skeptics to disprove vague evidence that even most believers are lukewarm on. It's up to the "researchers" and book writers to prove that these sounds did, in fact, come from living Ivory-billed woodpeckers, and not Blue Jays, gunshots, pranksters, other searchers playing recordings etc. etc.
Bogus claims, whether it's ESP or Bigfoot or the Ivory-bill always rely on weak evidence that's nearly impossible to disprove. Or prove. That makes it useless for everything but making some people feel good, providing a meal ticket for a few, and stringing people along.
As far as mockery is concerned, the time is here. They deserved to be openly mocked because as long as people politely take them seriously they're going to keep publishing and getting grant money and telling school kids that conservation = Ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Was out last weekend at Malheur NWR, a huge wetland sink on the vast sagebrush plains of eastern Oregon. Lo and behold, a clear trumpeting sound was heard, like an Ivorybill!
When everyone's eyes cleared, the courting Trumpeter Swans became clear.
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