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16 comments:
The Okefenokee Swamp is visited by many birders each year. You can even rent boats and explore certain parts of the swamp not accessible by foot. The reasoning for this new seach is there are islands and parts of the swamp that have not been visited in many years. This species has not been documented there since the collection of a specimen around 1916 (or possibly 1912, the exact year is not certain) and the subsequent 1919 detection of call notes by an ornithologist. Thereafter, the swamp was extensively logged and most of the old growth timber was gone by the 1920's. Ivory-bills were known to wander in search of food and would have been seen by now if they actually still existed. They would not confine themselves to a small unexplored island and never leave it. Searching this swamp is a waste of time, and I'm personally getting tired of hearing about it. Oh, and they are also looking for Bachman's Warblers? Why not Carolina Parakeets?
Okay, we'll be sure to look for those also. Thanks for the tip.
The last record accepted by Burleigh for Georgia was in the Okefenokee in 1948, not 1919. There have been occasional forays into the parts of the swamp that are not generally accessible since then, some specifically looking for IBWOs.
The most recent record in Georgia worth considering was a sighting by Stoddard in the Altamaha swamps circa 1960 (seen from a low-flying airplane).
Bachman's Warbler was never recorded in the Okefenokee. All specimens and nesting records are from the Savannah area, the last one being in 1924.
So an IBWO photo was considered the "million dollar photo" in 2005-6 and in 2007 it is good for a subscription to a free newsletter.
Here's to CLO/TNC and all the TBs for taking the IBWO from icon to joke. The next time you find a conservation issue you want the public and media to take seriously, try acting like adults.
Clearly these searchers are not following the Chickcharnie protocol:
Carry flowers or bright bits of cloth with you to charm these mischievous creatures. Legend says if you see a chickcharnie and show it respect, you'll be blessed with good luck for the rest of your life. Be careful not to sneer at it, however, or your head will turn completely around!
My suspicion is that Hill sneered, and that the rest failed because they've been wearing camo outfits.
Should look for Florida panthers there too. Take Tyler with you.
this might be interesting as a post of its own, it is a snip of the testimony of Dr. Kevin Padian from the Kitzmiller V Dover trial.
I have never felt like i've seen a clear answer about the peer review of the original Fitzpatrick article. We know that the relationship between Fitz and Kennedy was very clubby, and we know who some of the reviewers were, but I'm curious is the reivew was EVER anonymous. It also puzzles me why Jackson was not selected as a reviewer since he would have been a logical choice from someone who had no political involvment in the story. I've also heard from people at AAAS that kenedy moved the process of peer review from the normal staff to the book editor at Science, a move that was highly un-usual.
I raise this because it is well understood by scientists everywhere what the stakes are in this process, and it isn't like Science doesn't deal with these exact issues every day - so for them to deviate from protocol, just seems like a major news story in and of itself.
I'd like to hear other Skeptic reader comments on this question.
in the following, the Q. is the lawyer for the plantif, and the A. is Dr. Kevin Padian.
A. I don't know if you've gone through the concept of peer review much in the court, but by "peer review" we mean that if you publish -- if you have some research that you've produced and you want to get it published, you send it to a journal in the field, and the editor, who is an expert in the field, takes your manuscript and sends it to several experts that you can't choose and you don't know who they are. And --
Q. So you, as the author, don't know who is reviewing your articles?
A. That's correct. This is the anonymity of peer review. Ordinarily you don't know who these commentators are.
Q. What's the purpose of that?
A. Well, it's basically so that they can give a frank appraisal of what you're writing without worrying about whether they're going to offend you and, if you're a senior scientist, whether you're going to get mad at them or something. I don't know. But it's been a habit that's always been the case in the scientific field, certainly.
And the reviewers who look at your papers then decide whether you've followed the right procedures for going about the science, whether the methods you use are up to date, whether you've cited all the literature that's relevant, whether you've inferred or speculated on more than you should, or whether it's basically within the grounds of what is acceptable science.
And they will propose changes, major or minor. If they don't think that your paper is very good, they'll suggest it be rejected, and the editor takes that into consideration.
Q. And so is everything that is submitted to a peer-review journal published?
A. Oh, no. A lot submitted to peer-review journals isn't published. It depends on the journal. On the journals on which I've been an editor, you have an acceptance rate of anywhere from 50 percent upwards or downwards to 30 percent, for example, in the ones I'm familiar with.
Q. And is there a -- what you might consider a hierarchy of journals for publication?
A. Yes, there are certain journals that pretty much every scientist in the world reads every week. Two of them in particular are Nature, which is published in London by Macmillan Journals, and Science, which is published in Washington every week by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is our sort of central public science organization in America.
Everybody reads those journals because they contain good review articles, but mainly the hottest sort of new research in all fields. They will also include news about new scientific developments not just in science but in education, industry, technology, even this court case, for example.
Q. And do they have a high rejection rate?
A. Oh, yes, they have a very high rejection rate. No more than about 10 percent of what's submitted to them even gets considered for publication.
Q. Now, is there something called -- is it an impact factor?
A. Yeah, there's a -- the Institute for Scientific Information produces a measure of how important journals are basically to the fields. Journals like Nature and Science have a very high impact factor. But they're general journals that everybody reads, and they're highly selective.
Some fields are smaller fields, they don't have much of an impact because they're not cited very much simply because the fields are small, but within the fields they might be very important. So you could have an impact factor that is relatively low, but in the field it's high because it's cited a lot for that field.
Q. And the way they measure this impact factor is to see how many times an article from that publication is cited thereafter?
A. That's basically it.
Anonymous--you are "getting tired of hearing about it"? How did you hear about this? You came to an Ivory-bill blog, clicked on a link, then read a story. Man they really forced that info down your throat didn't they. Can't you find anything better to whine about?
Anonymous--you are "getting tired of hearing about it"? How did you hear about this? You came to an Ivory-bill blog, clicked on a link, then read a story. Man they really forced that info down your throat didn't they. Can't you find anything better to whine about?
There are many sources of information. It's probable this person heard about it from more than one source and is "tired" of hearing about searches for a bird that is almost certainly extinct. It wasn't a whine, it was a legitimate complaint. There's a difference.
The last record accepted by Burleigh for Georgia was in the Okefenokee in 1948, not 1919.
What is your source? Even if true it is not a generally accepted claim.
Thomas D. Burleigh, Georgia Birds, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. This is the authoritative benchmark work on Georgia birds. The Okefenokee records from the 1940's are well known and have been widely accepted without controversy for five decades. The Singer Tract's claim to fame is the last specimens and photographs, not necessarily the last birds.
The Okefenokee records from the 1940's are well known and have been widely accepted without controversy for five decades.
Well known? Accepted without controversy?
Who saw these birds and how were they documented? Were they accepted by the state records committee?
State records committees did not exist in the 1940s. Burleigh is THE standard for early 20th century Georgia ornithology. The Okefenokee/Coleraine birds were seen by the repected ornithologist Fred V. Hebard of Pennsylvania, among others, whose family owned large plantation holdings in the area and make extensive observations of birds in that part of Georgia.
It would do many of the people involved in this dicussion well to do review original sources rather than just repeat what you have read online and in popular media. Burleigh is a prominent ornithologist of the period, and his word on Georgia birds an extremely well-known reference which is widely available in libraries.
Who saw these birds and how were they documented? Were they accepted by the state records committee?
Okay, so they were seen by one respected out of state ornithologist and were not accepted by the state records committee because it did not exist at the time. Was there no documentation in the form of photos, specimen, or written notes? If I remember correctly, Burleigh received this information in the form of a sight report. You can't promulgate this type of a report as a confirmed sighting. It is just one of hundreds of reports from the southeast and carries no more weight than any other unverified report. It may or may not have been seen in 1948 but we can never be sure without some type of evidence. The last specimen from Georgia came from the Okefenokee and that was from sometime around 1916, before the old growth timber was removed. Burleigh was a prominent ornithologist but he did not see the birds and did not appear convinced they still persisted there. There were also reports from about the same time period or slightly earlier of a wintering Bachman's Warbler and Carolina Parakeets from the Okefenokee. The warbler was supposed to have been collected and the parakeets were filmed but these are not considered verified records. Why?
Because the specimen could not be found and the film could not rule out other species of parrot.
The most recent record in Georgia worth considering was a sighting by Stoddard in the Altamaha swamps circa 1960 (seen from a low-flying airplane).
Stoddard collected thousands upon thousands of bird specimens. He never accepted a record without a specimen. Yet he did not collect this species because he thought it was rare, but by his own admission he had seen ivory-bills hundreds of times. Without a specimen, I don't think he would have officially accepted his own sightings as an undisputable record (especially one from a moving airplane) and therefore, why should we?
In reference to Stoddard: the word used was "considering", not "accepting".
Burleigh presented the Hebard records as records, not possible or hypothetical reports. That was his judgement, and in those decades the judgement of the professional ornithologist who took on the monumental task of compiling the comprehensive State Bird Book was considered to be the prevailing authority. If you wish to challenge them, you should find where they were subsequently reexamined by the State records committee. If they were never addressed and retracted by that committee, then they still stand as accepted records. Whether or not you agree, that is the official status.
Burleigh did not include the Bachman's Warbler and Carolina Parakeet reports you mention. Indeed, the only Parakeet record he includes is from 1855.
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