Stotz to speak

Cornell search team member Doug Stotz will be speaking about the IBWO this week. An excerpt from this article:

1. Sometimes you just have to put the information out there, and let people make their own decisions and jokes. We all need more information on woodpeckers! Crave it. And Doug Stotz, conservation ecologist/scientific bird guy at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, will give it to you. He'll chat about the latest efforts to find "The Ghost Bird -- The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker" at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Walter E. Heller Nature Center in Highland Park. It's free. Call (847) 968-3321.

Stotz is mentioned at WorldTwitch here (2006):

"I would not say absolutely, positively, 100 percent, that bird in the video is an ivory-bill. But I think that is the best explanation." [Certainly it's the "best explanation" to maintain employment and funding for the time being.]

-- Douglas Stotz, conservation ornithologist, Field Museum, Chicago

More background information is here (2005):

The film left no doubt. "It's not a clear, beautiful photo," Stotz said. "But when someone provides a clear, beautiful photo, people say, 'That's a fake.' Nobody would fake something this poor in quality."

By the way, Stotz is also mentioned in this article. Here's an interesting snippet:

Naturalist Gene Sparling, the resident of Hot Springs, AR, who was the first person to rediscover the ivory-billed woodpecker, was one of the guest speakers. He told the audience that, while it had been his life-long dream to rediscover the woodpecker, by the time he actually did rediscover it he had become somewhat reluctant to discuss it with anyone. He could not actually believe his lifelong dream had come true!
"I did not tell anyone. I only posted my discovery on my canoe club's Web site and I did not name the bird. I described what I saw," said Sparling.
"One of the club members took me to task for not taking the discovery seriously enough. Once I learned my sighting was within the historic range of the ivory-billed woodpecker, I contacted Cornell. The first researchers that came down, on our first canoe trip, we saw the ivory-billed woodpecker. That began the largest search for an extinct species in North America!" added Sparling.
Willard and Stotz had been asked to participate by the director of the Cornell laboratory, John W. Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had once been curator of birds at the Field Museum and both researchers were happy to help their friend document the rediscovery of a lifetime.
"John Fitzpatrick showed the video to me in my apartment. The first time through was at full speed, and when he asked what the bird was, my guess was a wood duck. As he slowed it down, it became clear it was not a duck, and at very slow speed I could not come up with anything else but ivory-bill. I tried to think of something else, but could not. Then came the thrill—the ivory-bill was still with us," says Willard.
While Willard and Stotz were not able to actually see the enigmatic woodpecker, Willard says he enjoyed the opportunity to experience the unique landscape of the cypress swampland that the late William Faulkner had named the Big Woods of Arkansas.

By the way, it sounds impressive to say that Faulkner himself named the place "the Big Woods of Arkansas", but is that actually true? Note an excerpt from this article:

As director of the Arkansas field office of the TNC from 1986 to 2003, Nancy DeLamar spent a lot of time working on the Big Woods. She even gave them their name.

State Natural Heritage biologist Tom Foti recalls sitting in a airport bar after a conference on what he and colleagues were calling “the White River-lower Arkansas River Megasite.” DeLamar told them that wouldn’t do. Faulkner didn’t name the place “megasite” and neither should they. Big Woods stuck.

Note what Keith Sutton writes here:

For more than 40 years I've been hunting and fishing in the Big Woods. Before the ivory-bill, however, we never called them the Big Woods.

I suppose it's as good a name as any for the 550,000 acres of floodplain forests lining the Mississippi, White, Arkansas and Cache rivers in eastern Arkansas.

After all, this is a big place with lots of woods and, as many students of literature can tell you, Big Woods was the name used by writer William Faulkner to describe the portion of this once-vast area he hunted in Mississippi.

Before the ivory-bill, however, we never called them the Big Woods. The name just seemed redundant.