Off topic: Arkansas journalist Pat Ivey finally admits that she reported the 2005 Ivory-billed Woodpecker rediscovery story as the truth even though she "knew for a fact, however, that this was an elaborate false story being shoved down the throats of the people"

I have at least one current reader who remembers the days (2005-2007) when this blog was devoted to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker rediscovery hoax.  This hoax shared many similarities with the global warming hoax, with completely crappy evidence, appeals to authority, skeptic bloggers helping to slowly erode gullible mainstream belief, strong environmental angle, public money foolishly blown, etc etc.

As time goes on, I predict that we'll see more mainstream reporters openly telling us, years after the fact, that they didn't ever actually believe in the global warming hoax stories that they were writing.  They were just reporting what other people were saying!

Pat Ivey : The Great Arkansas Snipe Hunt ends

When the first press releases on those sightings came in on the Courier News facsimile machine, I was all a-flutter with the possibility of the re-emergence of a species of bird previously thought to have been extinct since the early 1940s. And I began making those reporter calls immediately.

I am not going into a lot of detail about the people with whom I spoke that morning, but one call was all it took to make me doubt the validity of these reports. It was a person I knew and had worked with many times, who told me they were on a previous team that researched the bird for a number of years, and that the Ivory Billed Woodpecker could not have been sighted in Arkansas or anywhere else, because it absolutely was extinct. And they said it on the record.

I was typing up my story in the vein that this was either a hoax or a mistaken sighting, when that person called back. They hinted that they had been called by someone much higher up their food chain and told not to allow what they said to be publicized. They then said they supported the search for this bird in Arkansas.

Since both conversations were on the record, I actually could have published my story anyway. But I valued this person as a source, so I simply printed the information transmitted to me on the press release and comments on it from local people. I knew for a fact, however, that this was an elaborate false story being shoved down the throats of the people. I was just never able to get anyone to confirm it.
...my good friend and former County Judge Steve McGuire summed the situation up perfectly when he announced at a meeting with state officials to discuss funding of a local project that he was certain he could find a Diamond Billed Woodpecker in the swamps of Big Lake if it meant millions of dollars for our wildlife preservation efforts....Just because people we know to be honest and well-meaning are saying a thing does not make it so. Just because our elected officials are shouting something at the top of their lungs does not mean it is not a falsehood. Before we swallow whole any story we are fed, regardless of how good it sounds, we need to take a really hard look at all the facts underneath the rhetoric.

Pat Ivey, January 2011 : What is it with Arkansas and birds?

Now, I was suspicious about this story right from the start. The day the story hit the news wires in 2005, I called a source who was in Mississippi County at that time and who was connected with Game and Fish. This person had in fact spent a number of years on a task force whose sole purpose was to find evidence somewhere in the world that the ivory bill still existed, and he had traveled worldwide looking for it. He assured me the reports were bogus, the ivory bill is extinct.

A few moments later, he called back. Speaking in single syllables, he said I could not use our former interview, the official stance of Game and Fish was that the ivory bill had been sighted in Arkansas and gave me a phone number for someone I could quote. And hung up