BINAC post

Here.

Caleb Putnam to speak on Monday

Here; another related article is here.

Since he's a Records Committee guy and he was evidently also a searcher in April 2005, I'd be interested in finding out what he's saying these days.

About that alleged 1966 Brown/Sanders sighting

Over the last 6+ decades, one of the "best" of all claimed U.S. Ivory-bill sightings was this one:

28 Aug 1966: Bedford P. Brown, Jr., and Jeffrey R. Sanders reported watching 2 Ivory-billed Woodpeckers scaling beetle-killed pines for 16 min along the fringes of Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle (Dennis 1979).

Cyberthrush posted about the claimed sighting here, and on page 160 of his book, Jerome Jackson wrote:

Dennis searched the area and did not find the birds but considered the sighting valid.

On page 247 of his book, Geoff Hill writes:

...According to Ken Able, who was a prominent birder as well as ornithology professor at the time, Brown and Sanders were active birders in the Chicago area in the 1960s and 1970s. They nearly always birded together, and over a period of several years they reported a number of very rare birds around the Chicago area. Ultimately, these reports were shown to be fraudulent, Brown and Sanders confessed, and a long retraction of records appeared in the pages of Audubon Field Notes, the forerunner of North American Birds. The 1966 ivorybill sighting along the Yellow River occurred during the time of the incidents in Chicago.

Notes from a guy named "Ken Able" appear on Hill's website here. Able heard some toots in the forest last month and was moved to write:

...Could these calls have been made by a blue jay or something else other than an ivory-bill? Of course, anything is possible. Personally, I am convinced that they were made by an ivory-bill.

Update: A related post from BINAC is here.

More from Cyberthrush

Here.

In the comment section, David L. Martin (fangsheath) sounds a lot like a believer:

I can assure you that resolution will come. There are those of us who have never depended on big money to find rare species and we will find and document these birds.

Last May, he wrote:

The lack of clear images of ivory-bills does in fact concern me. Many of the incongruities between these extant ivory-bills and historical accounts concern me. I do not dismiss any of these things, nor am I a "believer," as some have tried to label me. Similarly, I neither ignore nor dismiss the sightings, acoustic data, foraging sign data, and video evidence. Ignoring and dismissing is not skepticism. Nor is contorting and distorting evidence almost beyond recognition so that it will fit your hypothesis. I consider myself a genuine skeptic, not a "Skeptic."

"the team wants to avoid giving out false hope"

Here.

Julian Hough on ID-Frontiers

Check out the postings by Julian Hough here and here.

"Plenty of photos and videos"

Here's one more sentence from Geoff Hill's "Ivorybill Hunters" (page 201):

If we are right about ivorybills living along the Choctawhatchee River, with a larger search crew, we'll locate roosts, nests, and get plenty of photos and videos of the birds.

Rohrbaugh to speak in Utah on May 19

An excerpt from this link:

The current issue of the American Birding Association’s Birding, covers “The Great Ivory-billed Woodpecker Debate”. Is it a critically endangered species or an extinct species? Great Salt Lake Bird Festival Keynote speaker is Ron Rohrbaugh, Director of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Project at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. Ron will give us the latest updates on this project and be available for questions. His Keynote address will be at the Dutch oven dinner on Saturday May 19th. Order your tickets early.

No bestseller for Hill

A reader pointed out that Geoff Hill's book "Ivorybill Hunters" is currently ranked #284,824 on Amazon.com.

An excerpt from a related link entitled "What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean":

Read an average rank of 1,000 to mean you have a seriously successful title, an average rank of 10,000 to mean your doing pretty good for a book that's no bestseller, an average rank of 100,000 to mean it's not going to contribute significantly to your income, and an average rank of 1,000,000 to mean you only need to check a couple times a year to computer the average rank.

I know that the Amazon rankings can and do vary quickly, but it seems clear that Hill's book won't sell anything like the "Grail Bird" (which, I'm told, had a sales rank in the 500 range at one time).

In my opinion, the lack of enthusiasm for Hill's book is another indication that the most recent Ivory-bill hysteria is ebbing away.

From "rediscoverer" to "he who claims"

An excerpt from this BirdChick post:

I have to admit that I got a kick out of the announcement that read "The Oak Savanna Birding Festival will feature a presentation by BOBBY HARRISON from Huntsville, Alabama. He is one who claims to have seen the Ivory-billed Woodpecker." It's gone from "rediscoverer" of the ivory-bill to "he who claims". No matter what side of the fence you are on, Bobby is a great story teller and more than worth the price of admission.

Searches winding down

As noted earlier, the Texas IBWO search may have already ended (on March 31).

This link hints at an April 13 completion for the South Carolina search.

This FWS link (PDF) says that the eastern Arkansas search will continue through April 21. (It also says that organized, statewide searches are presently being supported in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas.)

This link suggests that the Hill/Mennill Florida search will continue at least through May 30.

More links

1. An attempt to map ideal IBWO habitat is here.

2. A reasonable paragraph from Cyberthrush is here:

By now too I would think there'd be a fair amount of data gathered from automatic remote cameras focussed on 'suspicious' cavities (in Arkansas, if not at the Choctawhatchee) --- it would be interesting to know how many of these cavities were found to be used by Pileateds, how many were never caught in use at all, and how many were used by other creatures, neither PIWO nor IBWO --- just to get a better sense of how accurate the classification of 'interesting' cavities is. Maybe such data will be in Cornell's season wrap-up report???

Fishcrow again

Check out the April 1 entry here; also an ID-Frontiers post here.

Update: Now he's talking about an "aluminum model wing".

Tim Gallagher interview

A conversation with Tim Gallagher on the "Calling All Pets" show is here.

The segment runs about 13 minutes, starting at the 26:55 mark...

More links

1. Is the Texas Ivory-bill search season over? An excerpt from this Nov. '06 blog post:

John Arvin has a team of three paid biologists (along with assorted volunteers) to conduct the work between Nov. 1, 2006 and March 31, 2007.

2. Researchers at Cornell are creating lie-detection software. Some details are here.

3. A blog post by Leland Rucker is here. An excerpt:

I read Gallagher and Jackson's books with great enthusiasm in the spring of 2006, but since then, the lack of evidence beyond murky recordings of woodland sounds and tales of cameras that wouldn't work has cooled any fervor about rediscovery I might have had. The paucity of real evidence is overwhelmingly against the bird’s rediscovery.