Friday, October 13, 2006

The Birdchaser's view

Here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If cougars could fly
What would it matter
If ivory bills
Inhabited the hills?

The tables would turn
And we would be chased
We’d be the hunted
Perhaps we’d be humbled

But as it is, we have neither
Cougars don’t fly
Ivory bills don’t either
It’s all gone awry

Anonymous said...

This is interesting

http://www.vulpes.org/foxden/sounds/typical-fox-yell.wav


Wow. I heard a sound like that once in the middle of the night while camping in Montana. Scared the bejeebus out of me.

Anonymous said...

Okay, it's Saturday morning. My workaday brain is recovering a tad.

Would it be possible to write a musical knock off of "The Music Man" and call it "Where's the Ivory Bill,...Man!?"

Anonymous said...

“Deer bleats as a potential source for the kent calls. Interesting. Could someone post a link to where we could actually hear some of these?”

Just remember…”Mares eat oats and does eat oats but little does ain’t ivory”… that having been said, I posted this a while back…

http://deerfever.com/downloads/fawnbleat.wav

I agree it’s the best fit I’ve heard, but I don’t think fawn bleats will ultimately explain the majority of the panhandle clips. There are just too many recorded for a fawn bleat to make sense.

Remember that the Dittman anecdote shared here before was presented as a once in a lifetime encounter. I have young deer in my yard nearly every day, but I’ve never been lucky enough to hear a bleat like this. On the other hand, I know I’ve heard countless deer snorts, grunts, and hisses, and I seldom have trouble making an immediate visual connection to the source.

Birders are good with sound. If a fawn bleat were common enough for team panhandle to pick up over 200 of them in a couple of months, we’d all have that sound in our mental inventories.

To get a handle on this let’s imagine that these bleats are quite loud and able to be easily heard a few hundred meters away. Well, it seems unlikely that we could miss such a thing, so lets assume the opposite… fawn bleats are quite soft, and not typically heard above ambient woods sound more than fifty meters away. If this is the case, then the panhandle ALS’s would’ve had about 4 percent coverage of the site. So the 200 some bleats over a few months might be extrapolated to 5000 distress calls during daylight hours in the two square mile area. That again, just doesn’t fit experience.

Remember that not just the ALS devices, but also field observers unaware of what the ALS devices were finding, repeatedly picked up the sounds in similar patterns. I find it unlikely that observers regularly got close enough to young deer to hear their repeated bleats over time, without making the connection to deer activity.

pd

Anonymous said...

"If this is the case, then the panhandle ALS’s would’ve had about 4 percent coverage of the site. So the 200 some bleats over a few months might be extrapolated to 5000 distress calls during daylight hours in the two square mile area. That again, just doesn’t fit experience."

Now I get it, Pd! What you are saying is that we have about 5000 Ivory-billed kents rather than deer bleats!

Ok, but Auburn must be the worst birders in the world. And certainly the worst photographers in the world. And certainly Mennill is right. The birds are all up and down the river. 5000 kents! My god, just look up, people! Probably more Ivory-bills than cypress. Or at least one per cypress!