I share your skepticism about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Here's something you might consider posting on your blog. Readers would find it interesting I suspect.
I'm an avid birder and I read both Audubon and Birder's World magazines. This month the Birder's World issue (August) hit my mailbox first and contained a tidbit from Kenn Kaufman about the Ivory-bill situation. It was an interesting preamble to his comments in the Audubon article, which I noticed you linked to in a blog posting on July 5th. He's clearly a skeptic.
Kenn writes a piece called "ID Tips" in each issue of BW that focuses on a particular species or group of species. The August piece was on the Whimbrel and species that might be confused with it, including the presumed extinct Eskimo Curlew. The last paragraph reads:
"Two centuries ago, we would have been discussing how to tell the Whimbrel from its smaller cousin. Eskimo Curlews were abundant then, migrating from the Arctic to the pampas of Argentina in the company of American Golden-Plovers. Market hunting did them in, and the Eskimo Curlew has joined the ghostly company of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. We can't prove that it's extinct, but no sighting in decades has been confirmed. Today, a small curlew seen in North America is more likely to be a Little Curlew, a vagrant from Asia - or just a runt Whimbrel. Any sightings of odd small curlews should be backed up thoroughly with photographs."
Not so subtle, eh?
Dave Hewitt
Gloucester, VA
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Kenn Kaufman on IBWO in Birder's World
A reader writes:
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“This is a species for which a concerted, exhaustive range-wide search had been long, long overdue,” John Fitzpatrick, a highly respected ornithologist and the Cornell Lab’s director, wrote Audubon in a recent email. A four-person mobile team extended the effort across the Southeast this year and plans to continue searching in promising habitat at least through next year. Fitzpatrick defends the effort because he regards “the timeless value that could be gained by locating one or more remnant breeding pairs of ivory-billed woodpeckers as, quite literally, priceless.”
Same old baloney. The same platitudes could be recited about any number of extinct species for which expensive dedicated searches were never conducted. Finding a pair of saber toothed tigers would be way cooler than finding an IBWO. We can't prove they're extinct. Imagine how wonderful it would be to find a living pair.
Here's a blurry photo of a tiger. Are those saber teeth? Look at pixel three in frame 4. That isn't consistent with a typical tiger stance. Plus we had five sightings. And we've recorded some sounds that we can't identify.
Someone better call a press conference.
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