One year later, in the afternoon of 16 March 1987, an observation was made that would appear to be the very last positive record of the species. Giraldo Alayón and Aimé Pasada saw a female woodpecker flying at a distance of about 200 m.A female flyby at 200 meters?!
I did a little searching and found this very interesting piece by Cuban herpetologist Alberto Estrada. The piece identifies Giraldo Alayon (above), as an arachnologist, and Pasada (above) as Alayon's wife.
If you're a believer in the mid-1980s Cuban Ivory-bill "rediscovery", Estrada's piece should give you a sinking feeling. It's got all the earmarks of your typical Arkansas/Choctawhatchee-style IBWO hysteria--a flurry of very low-quality sightings at the beginning, lots of excitement over things like bark peeling and toots, subsequent years of fruitless searching without a single photo, etc.
Yes, I know that Pileated Woodpecker wasn't a confusion species in Cuba, but note what Tim Gallagher wrote starting on page 163 of The Grail Bird:
The rediscovery of the ivory-bill there [Cuba] had generated intense scientific interest and media coverage, but all of the sightings consisted of brief glimpses totaling about a minute or two, and the researchers were never able to get even one photograph or sound recording of the birds. Subsequent searches in Cuba were relatively fruitless--researchers had perhaps a couple of tantalizing glimpses here and there, but nothing substantial. Some ornithologists now even openly doubt that Short and the others had really seen ivory-bills. They say things like "If you want to see an ivory-bill bad enough, a crow flying past with sunlight flashing on its wings can look pretty good."
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The one credible report from the expeditions to Cuba in the 1980s was that of Ted Parker, who went on the final, 1988 trip. Parker, an expert birder who carried a tape recorder and microphone at all times, neither saw nor heard Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. (Someone on the same trip, possibly Jerome Jackson, claimed to have seen one.) Parker observed old tree cavities that he thought might have been made by Ivory-bills. Parker's report cast doubt on the unverified claims that a bird was seen in the same area in 1986 and 1987. As in the case of the recent claimed sightings, the proponents of rediscovery have the burden of proof, which they failed to meet.
See No more hope for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Martin Lammertink, Cotinga 3 (1995).
Warren Dithrow jumps the shark!!!!
http://warrendithrows.blogspot.com/2007/07/we-saw-something-very-interesting-near.html
Suddenly we saw the outline of a large bird move from behind some oaks and rise out above the bayou. It looked like a large woodpecker but unlike the Pileateds we have seen it was flying fast and straight. We saw it for about 3 seconds in the open. Les is one of my top learners and he and I both agreed this looked different from the Pileateds we see. We didn't see any plumage detail so we know we have to be careful here. I am consulting two ornithologist friends of mine about this, and we have not decided how to proceed with reporting
I just posted this over at the Daily Green IBWO thread (which is getting rather nasty). Anyway, here's something I found out about the IBWO feather supposedly found in Florida in the late 1960s.
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I noticed something that Mark said that bothers me. From #62, Mark said: "A fresh feather of one was indeed found in a nesting cavity in Florida in the sixties though."
Mark, where did you come up with the term "fresh"? I thought the age of the feather was actually controversial, and it had not been dated.
I personally find that entire episode to be rather fishy. Here is a statement from the Supporting Online Material in Science Magazine, from a part entitled "Reports with disputed evidence". Pay close attention to the last sentence.
"Reported observations and recordings of at least one ivory-billed woodpeckers in Highlands County, Florida, from 1967 to 1969 ended when the tree containing their cavity blew down. A white feather reportedly recovered from near the downed cavity was identified by Alexander Wetmore as an innermost secondary of an ivory-billed woodpecker (S2). The nest cavity and feather are archived at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, Florida. Audio recordings reported to be from the birds they observed (archived in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology) are actually pileated woodpecker, northern flicker (Colaptes aurata), and red-shouldered hawk (Buteo
lineatus).
How could two people who supposedly know the bird and saw it over the course of 3 years completely blow every audio recording? And confuse it with 3 species, not just one?
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Does anybody have any further information about the this feather?
200 meters? Shoot, that's nothing. I've identified vultures as not being IBWO at no less than a kilometer.
Good post Tom. It's high time those stringy Cuban sightings received more scrutiny.
Does anybody have any further information about the this feather?
from post 3492 by Andigena on the endless Birdforum Ivory-bill thread:
Cinclodes; I have looked into the Agey/Heinzman reports some and have posted in the past about them. I spoke to Paul Sykes (USFWS) about them in February. He said that George Heinzman was a very reputable observer. He was a founding member of the Florida Ornithological Society and was a volunteer on the Bald Eagle nest surveys done at that time. As you can see in the article he and Norton Agey published, five people saw the ivory-bills at that site (all at one time). They observed the birds for two years sporadically, they tried and failed to make an audio recording. Then they wrote up everything in the article in Florida Naturalist.
Now, so many years later the following happens: 1) Cornell says the recordings they made only include rs hawk, flicker, etc. Well, duh, they said they did not succeed in recording the faraway calls! But Cornell used the failed recordings as a reason to discount their sightings---see notes in the paper in Science, April, 2005. 2) Jerry Jackson, while perusing the specimens at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, FL, notices that one ivory-bill specimen there is missing the innermost secondary---the same feather (by position) that is in the Wetmore letter (I have an email from JJackson about this). This is shared around the museum and Florida ornithology circles, and now people there say the Agey/Heinzman record is unsubstantiated.
I have inquired with the Florida Bird Records Committee, which is concerned about the feather business. Apparently a DNA analysis was done recently on the feather and the specimen to try and resolve the issue, and the results were "inconclusive" (fide Paul Sykes).
See also this link:
http://www.coastalgeorgiabirding.org/misc/letter.jpg
http://www.coastalgeorgiabirding.org
/misc/letter.jpg
Gee, I wonder why someone's reports would be discounted just because their Ivory-bill recordings were of other species and their feather matched a missing feather from a museum specimen?
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8013499386524304882&postID=7783740011471176914
Nutty goodness here.
I noticed something that Mark said that bothers me. From #62, Mark said: "A fresh feather of one was indeed found in a nesting cavity in Florida in the sixties though."
Hey, leave this guy alone. Like Bill Pulliam, he spent a lot of time in the woods -- more than you'd care to know -- so his opinion can't be just, like, dismissed.
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