Mechanical "kents"

An excerpt from this ibwo.net post (the bold font is mine):

...Both visits were in the same area of Wekiva/Seminole St. Forest. In the forest habitat, which included many dead large pines, I heard "horn toots" that to my ear were exactly identical to many of the Choctawatchee "kent" recordings. During the first visit on 9 Dec at ~5:30pm, temp 50F, I heard the "horn toots" as a breeze was moving through the pine woods and I immediately attributed the sound to the moving rubbing dead stems of pine trees. I returned on 9 Jan and visited the same area at dawn. The air was still, the temp about 40F and I heard no "horn toots"; many piwo's, and redbellies, a few downy's but no "horn toots". After a breeze started late in the morning, I revisited a site with numerous dead large pines and the "horn toots" were commonly heard and I visually saw the swaying tree stems.

During my entire search, only at Wekiva did I hear the tree "horn toots" that sound, to my ear, exactly like many of the Choctawatchee recordings.

MDR, Fairbanks Alaska

Ivory-billed Woodpecker funding

Just for review, note that some detailed information about Ivory-billed Woodpecker funding is still available at the USFWS site here (PDF) and here (PDF).

KATV story

Here.

At the moment, the story's "viewer comments" section has a skeptical flavor.

Ivory-bill thread on the Tropical Audubon board

Some highlights and a link are available here.

IBWO reportedly glimpsed in the Congaree!!

Here.

The Lord God Bike?

It's obvious that some folks still don't realize just how flimsy the Choctawhatchee audio evidence is.

If you're serious about birding by ear, you should get some headphones and carefully listen to real Ivory-bill vocalizations here, then compare them to a March 18 Choctawhatchee "Ivory-bill" here.

This is not a good match. A recent commenter suggested that a number of the Choctawhatchee "birds" sound more like a bicycle braking than an Ivory-bill kent, and I agree.

Note also the very strange pattern of the "Ivory-bill" sounds listed here. A relatively large number of alleged Ivory-bill kents (mostly single sounds) occurred during a week (March 13-20) when zero double-knocks were recorded. On the other hand, during the entire month of January, alleged Ivory-bill kent calls were recorded on only three occasions, while alleged Ivory-bill double-knocks were recorded on 32 occasions. If Ivory-bills are in the area, none of this makes the slightest bit of sense.

The bottom line is that if you collect enough sound data in any forest in America, a whole lot of tapping, tooting and squeaking should be expected.

A partial list of possible "kent-like call" sources might include:

1. Blue Jays
2. White-tailed Deer
3. Great Blue Herons
4. Common Moorhens
5. American Coots
6. Gray Squirrels
7. Red-breasted Nuthatches
8. White-breasted Nuthatches
9. Northern Flickers
10. Wild Turkeys
11. Sandhill Cranes
12. Red-winged Blackbirds
13. Common Grackles
14. Snow Geese
15. Spring Peepers
16. A duck hunter's blue-winged teal call
17. Someone blowing through the mouthpiece of a clarinet
18. Someone playing an old IBWO tape
19. Bicycle, ATV, or truck brakes
20. Tree branches or stems rubbing together
21. A distant oil well

A partial list of possible "double-knock" sources might include:

1. Pileated Woodpeckers
2. Red-bellied Woodpeckers
3. Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers
4. Gadwall wings
5. Mallard wings
6. A crow breaking open a nut
7. Tree branches clashing together
8. Distant vehicles on rough roads
9. Gunshots
10.Any number of other possible mechanical sources

Some supporting links are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Ivory-bills in Illinois?

An excerpt from this link:

Two years ago the ornithological world was rocked by the announcement of the Ivory billed Woodpecker's rediscovery in Arkansas on the Cache River. Much closer to home — on our own Cache River in Johnson County — birding sleuth Jesse Gilsdorf believes he's located the birds again! Sightings, tell-tale scalings and recorded calls of what can only be Ivory-bills makes this fascinating article very provocative reading.

Another update from Hill

Here.

If you guessed "more possible detections, but no photo, just like virtually every other IBWO search report for the last 60+ years", you were correct!

An excerpt:

It was a rather slow week for the Auburn/Windsor Ivory-billed Woodpecker search team. Three different searchers from our main search crew had possible Ivory-billed Woodpecker sightings all in a small area, but during none of these possible sightings did the observer clearly note diagnostic field marks of ivorybills. All three possible sightings involved two birds and one was associated with kent-like vocalizations, so we are carefully monitoring that area.

Harrison to speak

Details here (scroll down).

Another Mobile Search Team update

Here.

As of January 21, they still hadn't made it to Geoff Hill's search area to follow up on that alleged December 24 sighting by Tyler Hicks.

Note these excerpts from January 19:

...The start of weekend traffic and hunters picked up today which made the woods feel like a playground. Dogs were running around everywhere barking their heads off while gunshots rang out in every direction...Seven boats went by me in the morning while I was on small sloughs in the forest. I was very surprised that they could make it around on these small bodies of water, but it also let me know I didn’t have to worry about pulling the canoe over a log. My strategy for the day became to let the dogs and hunters flush an Ivory-billed Woodpecker to me.

Mennill to speak in March

Details here.

A few links

1. An article on two Arkansas searchers is here.

2. As of this moment, note that key skeptical language has been removed from the Wikipedia Ivory-billed Woodpecker page.

3. Mennill "loses" a sound technician here.

4. A poem by Susan Wood is here.

"Thousands of dollars worth of equipment"

...and yet they still told us a branch stub was an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

A new post from Cyberthrush is here.

Multiple sight reports from Kulivan

Check out this February 2000 newsletter of the Louisiana Ornithological Society.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

David Kulivan, a wildlife biology grad student and turkey hunter, has reported seeing ivory-billed woodpeckers on the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries-owned Pearl River Wildlife Management Area on two separate occasions: April 1 and December 27, 1999. Since that time there have been several expeditions to look for the birds in the area. Some have reported hearing "intriguing" things, but needless to say, no confirmation has been forth-coming. Now that the news of the report has filtered out around the country, various expeditions have been organized by out-of-state avid birders as well...

(Note that if you scroll down at the link above, you'll see that Mary Scott offered a free T-shirt to anyone who photographed an Ivory-bill.)

Kulivan's first alleged sighting was on April Fool's Day 1999, when he was an undergraduate student in forestry at LSU. Some snippets from Gallagher:

...They vocalized continuously, making a sound he had never heard before...The remarkable thing is that he had a 35mm camera in his game bag, which he had hoped to use to take pictures of his first turkey. But he was so much in shock, he didn't think to get it out and take some pictures...He watched the birds for at least ten minutes...He sat on the story for almost two weeks. Then one day after class he approached a professor, Vernon Wright, and said he needed to talk. He laid out the story before the astonished Wright, who told him to write up his notes immediately.

Were those notes ever submitted to any bird records committee, and were they ever made public?

At this link, it says that Kulivan's first sighting was "within
earshot of a four-lane highway". Some excerpts (the bold font is mine):

...The birds were but 30 feet from him at one point. He watched them for about 10 minutes before they flew, calling as they left...“There were saturation-bombing searches out there for the next few days” after Kulivan’s report, Dr. Remsen said. “The people looking came up with zilch. People saw big woodpeckers. They heard stuff. It was like this fever. But nobody ever got to study a bird.

The description in bold is interesting in light of this sentence from Tanner's book (page 62):

I have heard Ivory-bills give this call as one flew in to join its mate, but it is rarely that one will make any call when on the wing.

Here is a February 2000 piece written by Guy Luneau, David Luneau's brother.

Some excerpts:

He’s [Kulivan's] not a birder, but he says he knows birds...On Saturday, February 19 while we were there, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department and the Natural Heritage Program led a widely publicized, official search for the bird. How many people showed up to help? 38. THIRTY-EIGHT??? What’s up with that? Why not 138? Or 238? You’ve got the most reliable sighting of an "extinct" bird in the past 50 years, the bird that "every birder" dreams about seeing, and only THIRTY-EIGHT people show up? Furthermore, the Pearl River WMA is probably more road-accessible and closer to a population center than any of the other WMAs and NWRs in Louisiana!...

Overall, in reading these accounts from the Kulivan era, it looks like a time of great "Ivory-bill innocence" compared to today, when we've seen a number of recent, high-profile false dawns. Check out this account of a single kent-like call heard, circa 2000.