Although no single detection was definitive, the concentration of potential encounters during a short period of time in the relatively small Wattensaw WMA justifies follow-up search efforts. In 2007–08 we plan to conduct thorough searches of Wattensaw WMA and surrounding private lands, including cavity inventories and associated deployments of Reconyx cameras.If you read the report, you'll see that Alan Mueller personally recorded no fewer than seven "Ivory-bill" detections in the Wattensaw area in April and May 2007.
Note that Mueller has been described as the "avian conservation project manager for the Conservancy".
Let's say your name is something like Martjan Lammertink or Ken Rosenberg. If you seriously believed that Mueller might be encountering actual Ivory-bills week after week, would you:
a) haul yourself down there post-haste and do a massive amount of serious searching
or
b) choose to spend your time doing completely unrelated stuff like looking at warblers in South Carolina or New Jersey?
I don't see any evidence that Lammertink, Rosenberg, Fitzpatrick, etc chose "a".
Check out the April 27 entry by Lammertink here:
On this last on-site day we are racing against the clock with data entry and packing up. Tomorrow Chris will depart for his home in Oregon where he will resume work with Spotted Owls. Utami and I will head for Arkansas where we will store gear for the summer, then return to Ithaca. Nathan left a few days ago for his spring and summer job studying Pileated Woodpeckers in northern Louisiana. This is our final travel log entry.In reading that paragraph, I don't get a sense of great excitement over Mueller's alleged recent Ivory-bill detections.
It's clear to me that many CLO insiders no longer believe their own Ivory-bill propaganda.
When they no longer believe and yet continue to sell the Arkansas "Ivory-bill" story, I think they've crossed the line separating foolishness from fraud.
Someone from Cornell needs to exhibit the guts and integrity to finally pull the plug on this thing. Just do it--apologize, retract the Science paper, delete ivorybill.org, etc.
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It seems odd that the report is dated "September 2007", yet wasn't released until the end of November. Possibly this delay was inserted so that the public wouldn't have the report's information before the October 22 comment deadline for the completely insane, multi-million dollar Ivory-bill Recovery Plan?
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