Thought you might be interested in this old post by William Hayes, co-author of the new piece in Birding. It was forwarded to ARBIRD-L on March 6th 2006. Doesn't exactly show sound judgement, especially as regards Tmguy.
Penelope Hearne will restage her solo, “The Ivory Billed Woodpecker," using video and multimedia art. “The Ivory Billed Woodpecker” is dedicated to her Arkansas relatives, and was created to celebrate the alleged reappearance of this extinct American icon.
ilya turkey hunters are by far the most stealthy of all outdoorspeople - several i know ride mountain bikes in rather than atvs to get into the woods without making a lot of racket....That reminded me of a strange pattern in Mennill's sound data, where for a while around mid-March, the "Ivory-bills" seemed to forget completely about double-knocking in favor of producing some squeaky calls that sounded like bicycle brakes (I highlighted one example from March 18).
He [Mel Boring] proves this with his tale of two weeks he recently spent in the woods and swamps of Arkansas searching for the mysterious Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, previously considered extinct until its rediscovery in 2004. Boring was on the search for the incredible bird to see and learn about it first hand in hopes of writing a book on it. Unfortunately, he never saw it, but his hard work and research goes to prove the truth of his passion for non-fiction writing.
As our Ivory-billed Woodpecker search enters March, we’re still working to get a clear photo or video. I’m encouraged that we had two sightings in the past two weeks by members of our search team and the listening stations continue to record putative double knocks and kents in the same few square kilometers of forest where the sightings occurred and where team members have recently heard kents and double knocks in life. We are about 2/5 of the way through our search (most of the search crew stays until the end of May) and only about ¼ of the way through our camera deployments, so we still have plenty of time to get a definitive photo.
Like the famed ivory-billed woodpecker, my perfect running shoe is hiding. I have been as methodical and patient as those champion bird-watchers in my search. All I have to show for it is the orthopedic version of a fuzzy photograph. Flashes of greatness have flown from my feet in some shoes. But only for brief moments, and maybe they weren't even real.
I've got my fingers crossed for the woodpecker, but I'm pretty sure there is no perfect running shoe...
"My conviction is that the bird did exist in 2004-05—at least one, as we published,” says Fitzpatrick. “It may still be around. But we can tell you for sure that last year we could not find it in the same region in which we had regularly been seeing it earlier. It was probably a dispersing, unpaired male..."Regarding the "for sure that last year we could not find it" part--that seems seems a rather surprising choice of words, given all the "possible encounters" mentioned here.
The bird that he [Gallagher] and Harrison spotted was most likely a female, since it lacked a male's red crest.2. In a different encounter, Harrison once suggested that he saw a female:
The nape came to a point and seemed to have a tonal value darker than the neck and crown. A female? That was my first thought. If so, it is the first evidence of a living female, and it signals the possible existence of a breeding pair...3. On page 234 of "The Grail Bird", it says:
After viewing it [the Luneau tape], Martjan [Lammertink] had no doubts. "It's an ivory-billed woodpecker,", he said confidently. "Probably a female."4. In August 2005, we were supposed to believe that "at least two of the birds are living in Arkansas".
So....... my paper about Ivory-billed Woodpeckers was accepted by BMC Biology, and I expect it to be published online in the next few days (Open Access online - I'll post the website as and when). Those of you who know me will know roughly the message what's in it. It's kinda daunting with all the media interest surrounding the issue, that I'm starting to regret already sticking my head above the parapet in such a public and permanent way. Still, the truth will out - hold your nose and here goes.UPDATE: Some background on Collinson is available in this BirdForum post.
A while ago I got curious about that annoying guy who posts a lot on the IBWO forum and did some searching on his email. I think I found him: he's here where he posts a lot of political stuff and also this:A Little Bit of Good Environmental NewsHis email address in the above comes up as mmarmike@(XXX.XXX)
by MMinNY
Mon Aug 01, 2005 at 05:39:52 PM PST
I was a birder when I was a kid, and like so many others with that interest, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker captured my imagination. . .so much so that I broke down and cried when the rediscovery was announced a few months ago.
The last time I did some searching on him, his MMinNY screen name led me to somebody named Mark Michaels, aka Swami Umeshanand, but he seems to have changed his email on his swami site in the meantime. Check him out here and here as well as other places. The Swami has a law degree from NYU and lives outside NY.
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