Today's links

1. Another IBWO survey is here.

2. "The ivory-billeds are everywhere!" here.

3. I just noticed an item here:

Bird Club monthly meeting 7:30 p.m. in Room 101, Andrews Hall on the William & Mary campus. Biologist Bob Anderson presents ``Stumbling Across the Lord God Bird: Incredible Luck in the Choctawhatchee Basin, discussing the ivory-billed woodpecker during the monthly meeting of the Williamsburg Bird Club. Andrews Hall is behind Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall. Open to the public.

This may be the same Bob Anderson mentioned by Geoff Hill in January here:

We have also had three recent sightings including two by Bob Anderson, a Virginia birder who visited our site as a volunteer. Bob’s second sighting was particularly good. He observed an ivorybill 25 meters away as it flew up from the ground or from a very low perch. He clearly saw the broad band of white on the trailing edge of the wing of a large black woodpecker. He reported that it had a stiff-winged flight and that he heard loud wing flaps as it flew away from him.

Leah Filo story (with audio)

Here.

Update from Geoff Hill

Here.

Jim Williams articles

New article here; old one here (login may be required).

Short interview with Jerome Jackson

Here.

Mobile Search Team update

Here.

"There's real hope here"

A reader writes:

Yahoo's Assignment Earth has posted the story about the IBW here. Click on Our Stories and then Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Blog post from Rick Wright

Here.

An excerpt:

...For the Pale-billed Woodpecker, which ranges north to southernmost Sonora, is a member of the genus Campephilus, like the two great extinct woodpeckers of North America: the Ivory-billed and the Imperial. Inconceivably, we gave those two up in return for furniture veneers and ammunition chests, and they aren’t coming back.

Telegraph article

Here.

Trapp on "The Lord God Bird" movie

Here.

Today's links

1. Blog post from Collinson here.

2. Gary Graves weighs in on the Arkansas Birding List here:

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with maintaining an optimistic,
wait-and-see attitude about ivory-bills in Arkansas or Florida. We all wish that seeing an ivory-bill was just a simple matter of driving to St. Charles for the afternoon. Given the amount of scientific attention being focused on the remaining tracts of bottomland forest in the Mississippi Valley and other watersheds in the SE USA, ivory-bills will soon be found and documented if they actually exist. Despite the obvious personal and professional incentives, there is still no unequivocal evidence of ivory-bill survival in the USA since the 1940s. The burden of proof lies with those that claim rediscovery. Fantastic claims require an exceedingly high standard of proof. Every purported contemporary ivory-bill photo or video (or tape recording) that has come to light over the past decade has been effectively disputed (or has a more scientifically logical interpretation). That doesn't mean that ivory-bills are extinct, it just means that there is no scientific proof at this point of their continued existence. Ivory-bill sight records unsupported by high-quality video or multiple, high-quality photographs (exhibiting a variety of behavioral positions) are insufficient proof. Since the recent hype, there are now dozens if not hundreds of birders and sportsmen that swear they have seen ivory-bills (from Texas to Maine). But where is the proof? Just as contemporary sight records of Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, or woolly mammoth are not taken seriously, ivory-bills that can't be adequately photographed and seen repeatedly by a variety of skeptical observers are most likely the products of wishful thinking.