IBWO on realscience site

See the Word document(s) available at the bottom of the page here.

There's a related update at the ACONE site.

Update: Another related article is here.

Yet another article is here.

An excerpt:

"There is no credible evidence that the North American subspecies of Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis survived after the demise of the Singer Tract birds in the 1940s after the last substantial patch of old-growth habitat was destroyed," stated WorldTwitch.com, a birding web site run by John Wall. "What can only be another routine case of misidentification of the common Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus in good Pileated but poor Ivorybill habitat in Arkansas has been promoted as the latest Ivorybill 'rediscovery'."

Butler's "The Lord God Bird" to be shown March 17

Some details are available here.

Rewriting history?-OT

Here.

Pileated scaling bark

A reader sent in this information:

1. Here is a video of a Pileated scaling some bark.

Looks pretty tightly adhered to me!

2. Compare the scaling in the video above to the Choctawhatchee scaling here.

3. Note this excerpt from Hill et al:

Although Pileated Woodpeckers obtain food by scaling bark, they apparently do so primarily on trees with loosely adhering bark...

Today's links

1. John Trapp provides a reader's guide to Ivory-bills on the web here.

2. A small article from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is here.

An excerpt:

FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto said he and the six other Commissioners are bracing for potentially good news in coming months.

“This will be fantastic if we can confirm the woodpeckers are there,” Barreto said. “Many experts believe the ivory-bill is extinct, but experts have searches under way in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. Florida is the only state besides Arkansas to come close to confirmation in roughly 40 years.”

3. Bobby Harrison will speak once again on May 22 in Salt Lake City.

An excerpt:

For over 60 years, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker has been considered extinct, the victim of logging. However, in 2005 a team of scientists and bird enthusiasts reported that this beautiful bird is still alive in the swamps of eastern Arkansas. Join photographer and birder Bobby Harrison, part of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker research project, for a first-hand account of the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, from hip-deep, boot-sucking swamps to the politics of science and conservation.

A bit more from John Wall

Here.

An excerpt:

(Note to British birders feeling superior -- recall that most of Britain believed in Piltdown Man, the Loch Ness Monster, and crop circles for years or decades, but to my knowledge no leading American birder without a conflict of interest accepts the Ivory-billed Woodpecker "rediscovery". The common denominator may be low here, even at Ivy League universities, but there are some truly outstanding American birders.)

"Knocking on wood"

Here.

Financial support for Hill's search

Here.

An excerpt:

Other groups who have made a financial contribution to our ivorybill search include:

• The Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund
• The Nature Conservancy
• Florida Audubon Society
• Apalachee Audubon Society

Update from Diane Deresienski

Here.

An excerpt:

We staked out an interesting cavity and saw a Pileated Woodpecker leave the roost at 6:37am...

Partying like it's 2005

The Houston Audubon Society website currently contains some remarkable Ivory-bill "information".

Check it out here, here, here (1.5 MB PDF) and here.

Mobile Search Team update

Here.

An excerpt:

I also heard several Blue Jays in the area. One of them gave a series of kent-like calls...Greg Lewbart and Diane Derensienski reported having heard kent-like calls today.

Curiously, the Cornell team doesn't seem to be wildly enthused about the recent "Ivory-bill" detections reported by Hill's team.

Peer-reviewed, recent paper on sea level change-OT

Here.

Here's the abstract:

Nine long and nearly continuous sea level records were chosen from around the world to explore rates of change in sea level for 1904–2003. These records were found to capture the variability found in a larger number of stations over the last half century studied previously. Extending the sea level record back over the entire century suggests that the high variability in the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual. The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr). Over the entire century the mean rate of change was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/yr.

To me, this data seems highly inconsistent with hysterical scenarios of 20-foot sea level rises this century (that would be an average of 60+ mm/yr).

Again, here's an excerpt from an ABC News story (the bold font is mine):

The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has doubled in the last 30 years and global sea levels could rise 20 feet by the end of the century, creating tens of millions of refugees, according to his [Gore's] documentary.

Vaclav Klaus on climate change-OT

Here.

New Australian parrot a fake?

Here.

"Delving into Tree-Cavity Ecology"

Here.

"Climate hysteria not justified"-OT

Check out this article by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.

An excerpt (the bold font is mine):

Climate change is a real and serious problem. But the problem with the recent media frenzy is that some seem to believe no new report or development is enough if it doesn't reveal more serious consequences.

Indeed, this media frenzy has little or no scientific backing. One of England's foremost climatologists, Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, points out that green militancy and megaphone journalism use "catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioral change."

A biography of Lomborg is here.

"Richard Martin's Kent Encounter"

An update from Mennill is here.

Global warming articles--OT

Here and here.

Silencing a heretic? Here.

A little background on Greg Lewbart

1. Greg Lewbart and his wife Diane are mentioned in Hill's updates here:

On Christmas Eve, Tyler Hicks got an outstanding look at a female Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Only three people were in camp that day—Drs. Greg and Diane Lewbart and Tyler. Tyler heard double knocks in early morning, and using his radio he called Greg and Diane toward the location. Diane was first on the scene and she heard three kent calls. Things then quieted down and everyone went back to cavity surveys. An hour or so later, Greg and Diane heard four double knocks southwest of the area birds had been detected, and they called Tyler. Tyler rendezvoused with Greg and Diane and headed off in the direction they heard the double knocks...

2. Greg is the author of a 1996 novel called "Ivory Hunters: A Novel of Extinction".

3. Note this sentence from "Greg and Diane" here:

As a quick comparison, our "life list" contains about 125 species (Noah has 1300 and Tyler 2250).

4. Greg's biography is available here.