Friday – July 27
The Call of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker—Rediscovering the Holy Grail of Birds. In an illustrated lecture Bobby Harrison, photographer and associate professor, Oakwood College (Alabama), provides a first-hand account of the “rediscovery” of the ivory-billed woodpecker. He updates search efforts for ivory-bills, explores current controversy and presents his own unpublished video of the bird, long thought extinct. Following his 30 year-long single minded obsession, Bobby Harrison, along with Tim Gallagher of Cornell, “rediscovered” the ghost bird of the shadowy swamp. On February 27, 2004, searching in Arkansas’s hip-deep, boot-sucking mud and canoeing through turgid, brown bayous where deadly cottonmouths abound, Harrison (and Gallagher) identified an unmistakable ivory-billed woodpecker that flew in front of their canoe. Introduced by Jim Tate, formerly scientific adviser to the Secretary of the Interior. Baird Auditorium, noon.
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8 comments:
"explores current controversy"
"Following his 30 year-long single minded obsession"
I'm sure this will be a fair and balanced treatment of the controversy..... The Smithsonian should be ashamed of itself for patronizing these wackos.
Why don't they have a whole "fantasy lecture series" and invite Mike Collins, Geoff Hill, et al.
And all we're left with are a handful of people who desperately want to believe. Amy Lester's bigfoot analogy is looking more apt all the time.
The Bigfoot analogy is a good one. I first saw that analogy made by this blogger, where the names of Bigfoot and Ivory-bill were simply swapped and fit perfectly.
MOST major points of this debate I first encountered on this blog, and I think it's important to give credit. Tom Nelson put his name on the line and has taken a huge amount of heat for it, but he was right.
Check the posts from back in September, 2005.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/
2005_09_01_archive.html
Those posts were written the summer the discovery was reported. It's all pretty obvious to most most of us now. It certainly wasn't then.
If the Ivory-bill had been found, believers would be falling all over themselves to say "I told-you-so." The Ivory-bill Skeptic hasn't, although he certainly could!
Bobbie, you're doin' a heck of a job!
"Introduced by Jim Tate, formerly scientific adviser to the Secretary of the Interior"
The direct link between the CLO and Gale Norton.
[Cricket chirping]
Since when does the Smithsonian sponsor lectures on fiction? What are Harrison's ornithological credentials other than he claims to have seen and heard an extinct species 10+ times? He cannot prove any of those claims and same goes for all the other pretenders out there. Does SI bring in bigfoot biologists as speakers? If these lectures were objectively discussing the lore and mythology of such creatures, that's fine. But I find it difficult to believe that the Harrison spin machine won't be in high gear at this lecture....
I'm completely flabbergasted that the "PC" ornithological community continues to tolerate this farce. In any other scientific discipline these IBWO TB bozos would have been blacklisted by now. There is not a single authentic "stand alone" IBWO record since 1944, much less an authentic "cluster of sightings." Enough is enough.
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