Wednesday, February 08, 2006

"...teased but still unappeased"

This article (subscription may be required) in today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provides some detail about the results to date in this season's Cornell Ivory-bill search.

Some excerpts (the bold font is mine):
Searchers combing the Big Woods of Eastern Arkansas for ivory-billed woodpeckers have encountered plenty of “teasers” but so far have failed to snap a picture or new video evidence, a key member of the search team said Tuesday...Seven possible sightings were documented from Nov. 8 to Feb. 3, Lammertink said. None is on par with the seven sightings documented in a peer-review article in Science last year, he said...“We didn’t want to go out there and just document the bird again — we feel like we did that with the video,” said Elliot Swarthout...Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at Cornell University’s ornithology laboratory, said Tuesday that the lab would post an analysis of the Luneau video online today [Wednesday]...The analysis should be posted at www.ivorybill.org this afternoon, he said.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

...“We didn’t want to go out there and just document the bird again — we feel like we did that with the video,”

Apparently a lot of other people aren't buying that, or they wouldn't be trying to bolster their paper. Also notice that they simply rehashed their old, weak evidence because they've completely failed to find anything solid, before or since the release of the orginal paper.

If they aren't trying to document the bird, what are they trying to do? Study the bird? What have they learned so far?

Anonymous said...

..“We didn’t want to go out there and just document the bird again — we feel like we did that with the video,”

How could they feel they've accomplished that with the video?

That's what I find so incredulous.

If anything that video raises more questions than answers.

This is science?