Monckton on global warming-OT

If you've enjoyed exploring the shockingly bad science of the Ivory-bill fiasco, you may also enjoy exploring the details of the current global warming debate.

If you're interested, please take a very careful look at this piece (PDF) by Christopher Monckton.

If you'd like to dispute one or more of Monckton's specific points in the comment section, please feel free. I do ask that you humor me by actually reading Monckton's entire piece.

33 Ivory-bill detections by a single searcher

Even if you've seen it before, this snippet from Hill's site is worth re-reading:

Notable Aspects of our Search

• Sixty percent of total search hours were logged by one individual, Brian Rolek.
• Brian has 23 sound detections and 10 sightings.
• Through July 2006, nine of fourteen visitors who spent more than 48 hours at the site detected Ivory-billed Woodpeckers...

Around the horn

1. Some of the Birdforum believers have now revived the late, great "IBWO skeptics are secretly evil anti-conservationists" meme.

2. Virtual tumbleweeds are blowing down the streets of ibwo.net. That makes sense for an Ivory-bill site that strongly discourages critical evaluation of any "evidence". Don Kimball rattles the donation cup anyway.

3. It looks like Dan Mennill will continue to misinform the public about Ivory-bills in the Florida Panhandle at several upcoming lectures (scroll down here).

I'm not sure who wrote it, but note this sentence from this link:

Dr. Mennill is part of a team of ornithologists that have found compelling evidence of the existence of a pair of breeding Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the Choctawhatchee River swamp in Florida’s panhandle.

4. After roughly 22,923 days without Ivory-bill proof in the U.S., Cyberthrush may now try cutting back on "watching the pot".

5. Ilya Maclean has emerged as a multiple-threat player on Birdforum, scoring with both serious and funny posts.

Ph.D. follies

A reader pointed out that on Cornell's web site, Martjan Lammertink was said to have his Ph.D. as of the '04-'05 and '05-'06 search seasons. This excerpt is from the '05-'06 search team bios:

Martjan has a Ph.D. and an M.S. from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

However, as of the '06-'07 search season, he's no longer completed his Ph.D.:

Martjan has an M.S. from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has nearly completed his Ph.D. there.

Photos from "The Choc"

A link to these photos recently appeared on Diane Deresienski's log.

Another Mobile Search Team update

Here.

Pileated Woodpecker scaling

Check out the quality of the Pileated photos here.

If there were Ivory-bills in the Choctawhatchee, Hill's team should have produced lots of comparable Ivory-bill photos long before now.

Remember, Tanner said "In my own experience, Ivory-bills have not been particularly shy, certainly not noticeably more wary and wild than the Pileated Woodpecker."

Update--regarding Pileated bark scaling, John Mariani weighs in here:

A few years ago a Pileated went to work on a tree in my backyard - left piles of bark strips on the ground under it (a mess to clean up, which I thought funny at the time because I had read that that Pileated don't do that). What the Pileated did to my tree looked very similar to the pictures of "foraging sign" that Mike Collins has posted at fishcrow.com in his log dated 9-21-06 for the 2007 search season.

Proving the presence of IBWO with bark scaling is like trying to prove a house is haunted by recording funny sounds at night. We really need some good photos.

Still no photo

Another update from Hill is here.

A couple of excerpts:

We’ve had no high-rated detections this week either by humans or listening stations. The weather has been mostly cold and windy, and all birds are making less noise than they were in the warm weather a couple of weeks ago. Last year, we had a big jump in detections of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in early February, and we’re hoping for a repeat of that pattern this year.
...
With our cavity inventories past the half way point, Jamie and Zoe have lots of places to put cameras. We would love for one of our searchers or a local hunter or fisherman to capture beautiful color images of an ivorybill. Realistically though, a relatively boring black-and-white Reconyx image of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker perched on a tree is most likely to be the source of definitive documentation of ivorybills along the Choctawhatchee.

$9.4 million for an out-of-focus Pileated?

An excerpt from this link (dated 1/30/07 from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette):

$9.4 million committed to save ivory-billed land

Federal and state officials on Monday committed $9.4 million toward conserving 6,250 acres of wetlands and hardwood forests in the Cache River and Bayou DeView watersheds - land considered crucial for the ivorybilled woodpecker. BY KATHERINE MARKS

The article (viewing may require paid registration) references this USDA news release. Note that the USDA news release contains no mention of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Dr. Ragupathy Kannan to speak

An excerpt from this web page:

Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2-3 p.m.:

Dr. Ragupathy Kannan, associate professor of biology, will address the subject of Arkansas’ most famous rare bird and relate his personal experiences in the scientific search for it in “Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Updates from the Field” at 2 p.m. Feb. 21 in the Reynolds Room of the Smith-Pendergraft Campus Center. Hopes of the possible existence of ivory-billed woodpeckers in Arkansas were dampened when no sightings were recorded despite intensive searches in 2005 and 2006. However, a flurry of encounters in the panhandle of Florida has galvanized searchers nationwide. Dr. Kannan, who participated in Cornell University’s search team last year, provides updates from the field in this intriguing search for the elusive bird, which was last reliably seen in 1945. There is no admission charge, and the talk is open to the public.

Today's links

1. IBWO searcher "Fangsheath" describes toots from rubbing trees and also "an occasional squeaky sound ... from a gas well almost a mile away" here.

2. Mennill sneaks up on large cavities in the dark here.

3. Please see the Ivory-billed Woodpecker model linked from here. Lots of graphs and calculations are provided.

In my humble opinion, IBWO densities (per hectare) anywhere in the U.S. may be calculated quite accurately using this simple equation:

IBWO density = 0.000 * X

where X = absolutely any factor that you can imagine