Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Plan

I hesitate to post on this topic given some of the extreme responses it can generate, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service is about to publish a final recovery plan for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

But after five years of fruitless searching, hopes of saving the species have faded. "We don't believe a recoverable population of ivory-billed woodpeckers exists," says Ron Rohrbaugh, a conservation biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who headed the original search team.

The FWS has spent $14 million trying to document and conserve the ivory-billed woodpecker throughout the southeast United States, including $8 million for habitat preservation and $2 million for search-associated costs. The hunt was suspended last October after it ran out of money. Chasing down a string of dubious and faked claims of sightings added an extra burden, undermining already-stressed wildlife programmes, experts say.

Jerome Jackson, an ornithologist at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers who serves on the FWS's ivory-billed woodpecker recovery team, says that a draft recovery plan from 2007 is "incredibly biased". In his view, the plans have overemphasized evidence of the bird's existence to shore up political support for saving it. "I don't think I'm going to be happy with the final plan either," he adds.

Laurie Fenwood, coordinator of the ivory-billed woodpecker project at the agency's office in Atlanta, Georgia, says that recovery plans are needed to collect the best scientific knowledge on species — even if it's not clear whether they have already gone extinct.

For those who are interested, the draft recovery plan (pdf) is available Fish and Wildlife Service's Ivorybill website. Without confirmation of a viable population (or where it might be located), I think it would be difficult to construct a meaningful recovery plan. Perhaps preservation of more habitat within their historical range could be a centerpiece of such a plan, though such preservation could not be targeted to benefit a known population. If the final plan does call for additional conservation actions, it will need to be careful not to draw resources away from other threatened species that need it.

The linked article also carries the tidbit that the facts in the Daniel Rainsong episode may soon become more clear. For those unfamiliar with the name, he claimed to have found and photographed Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the Sabine River Basin of Texas. No photos have been released; instead he sent out a press release (which seems to have been revised subsequent to its initial release) to establish his "right of claim in this discovery." Cornell's Ivory-billed Woodpecker research group has met with him and plans to release their own analysis of Rainsong's story and documentation within the next week.

So far that claim has met with a great deal of public skepticism because the photos have been withheld and few details of the alleged discovery are available. The most thorough coverage of the story has been at cyberthrush's Ivory-bills Live blog. Hopefully next week's release will put the issue to rest.

Rare Species Sold As Food

This rare bird, a Worcester's buttonquail, was photographed at a poultry market in the Philippines before being sold as food. Prior to the photograph being taken, the species had not been seen for several decades and was presumed to be extinct.

Photograph by Arnel B. Telesforo

The incident is reminiscent of tales of American endangered and extinct species, such as this great moment in American conservation:

I had been spending the winter of I885-1886 in Florida, and during the month of March had made my Headquarters at the home of my friend, Mr. E.G. Smith, on Big Lake George. One of my favorite trips was up Juniper Creek, a small stream emptying into the head of the lake one mile west of the famous Volusia bar; the country through which it passes is one of those wild, semi-tropical swamps, so common throughout the Gulf States. Anhingas (Anhinga anhinga), Little Blue Herons (Ardea cœrulea), Egrets (A. egretta) and Limpkins (Aramus giganteus) were by no means uncommon, and it was in search of these that Mr. Smith and I took a boat on March 26 and started for this locality. We took with us as oarsman 'Jim' (one of the help on the place), who had done considerable collecting for me, and in whose accuracy as a marksman I had some confidence. We had gone perhaps a mile up the stream when a new and peculiar note sounded from the forest, which I can only liken as do other writers to the false high note of a clarionet; hastily landing I immediately went in search of its author (as I had not the faintest idea from what source it proceeded), but owing to the thickness of the underbrush it was next to impossible to penetrate farther than a few yards and, the noise ceasing entirely, I returned and we continued up the stream. Noon found us eating our lunch on a small knoll some four miles from the lake in the very thickest of the swamp. Around us stood gigantic cypress trees whose trunks and branches were adorned with thousands of air plants, and from which the myriads of vines which twined and twisted, and the gray Spanish moss hanging in long festoons, cast a gloom and solemnity hard to realize by one who has never seen it, yet lending a certain grandeur that the student of nature is not slow to appreciate. Scattered through the swamp and giving a tropical air to the whole were countless palmettoes (Sabal palmetto) towering to a height of seventy-five or a hundred feet, and it was in a little clump of these that we were taking our nooning. Suddenly that strange note sounded once, twice, three times,—approaching nearer with each repetition. It sounded exactly like the note of the White-bellied Nuthatch, only much louder and stronger, and grasping my gun, I remarked that I was going to kill the biggest Nuthatch on record. Hardly had the words left my lips when, with a bound and a cackle, a magnificent male Ivory-bill alighted in the trees directly over our heads; for a moment I was too astonished to speak, but in that moment it was joined by its mate, and the two began hammering away at the palmetto trunks. It was impossible for me to shoot without changing my position, while to move would be to alarm the birds; Jim saw my dilemma and whispered that he could kill them from where he sat, so passing him the gun I watched him take aim. He fired but missed, and the Woodpeckers bounded away into the thickest part of the swamp; hastily snatching the gun I started in pursuit, but failed to find them. Day after day I returned to the same locality in hope of securing them, but without success, and on April 7 I was obliged to leave for home without adding this much coveted species to my collection.

The author, Edwin M. Hasbrouck was writing in The Auk in April 1891, when the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was already known to be in serious decline. In fact, the author acknowledges this. His article survey evidence for the species's range at the time, in response to fears that it and the Carolina Parakeet might follow the Labrador Duck and Great Auk into oblivion. While some of the reports are strictly visual observations, most seem to be from specimen collecting activity, by people who probably should have known better.

Hasbrouck's prognosis for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker seems hopelessly optimistic, given the benefit of hindsight:

It will be seen from the foregoing, that in many instances the accounts are modified with the statement that the species is extremely rare as compared with past years, or else has disappeared from the localities entirely. Probably this is not altogether owing to the actual decrease in the numbers of the birds, but to its extreme wildness and desire for seclusion.... There are thousands of square miles of swamp throughout the Mississippi Valley and Gulf States that never will or can be reclaimed or settled, country that is admirably suited to this bird, and in which, as I have shown, it is much more common today than elsewhere; and here, it is safe to say, it will be found indefinitely; for, into those swampy fastnesses in which it most delights, few care to penetrate, at certain seasons none dare; and as but few are killed, and each pair in existence today will presumably raise its brood the coming spring and together with them repeat the multiplication each successive year,—it is reasonable to assume that the species will be found there many years hence.

The cavalier attitude that leads to killing to extremely rare species is not unique to the Philippines.

Update: See also this post on the buttonquail incident from Beginning to Bird.

Random Notes

Just a few gleanings from the weekend that did not make it into my last edition of Loose Feathers....

• Coffee and Conservation reviewed the shade-grown coffee that is a component of the American Bird Conservancy's Save the Cerulean Warbler campaign. The upshot is that the coffee sampled seems under par for the gourmet/specialty niche for which it is marketed. That is unfortunate since shade coffee plantations in Colombia form an important part of the warbler's winter habitat.
• A search for ivory-billed woodpeckers has been underway in the Big Thicket area of Texas. So far, no substantial evidence has materialized there. (Thanks, L.!)
  
• Some really unusual waterbirds were spotted around the vicinity of Hains Point on Saturday. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to look for them, but enterprising birders may still be able to find some. Check the reports on MDOsprey, here and here.
• Birds have differentiated sex chromosomes, but the dosage compensation between them is less effective than in mammals. (Paper here.)
• Here is a photograph of a really odd mallard. Hybrid? Domestic? Mutant? Who knows!
  

New Luneau Video Criticism

The identity of the bird in the Luneau video has been challenged in previous publications (e.g., Sibley and Jackson (pdf)). Now we have another paper that concludes that the bird in the video is a pileated rather than an ivory-billed woodpecker. This paper, by J. Martin Collinson, compared the Luneau video to similar poor quality videos of pileated woodpeckers in similar flight angles. You can read the abstract or the full open-access article (pdf). (Note that the pdf file is provisional.)

The Collinson paper undermines two key claims advanced in the Science paper that announced the rediscovery. One is that the bird in the Luneau video beats its wings too quickly to be a pileated woodpecker. The second is that the plumage patterns visible on the bird's wings are consistent with an ivory-billed woodpecker, but not with a pileated.

The Luneau video shows a woodpecker beating its wings at a frequency of 8.6 beats per second over eight wingbeats. This matches the frequency from an archived sound recording of an ivory-billed woodpecker in flight. The original paper claimed that this is too fast for a pileated woodpecker. However, videos reported in the Collinson paper recorded initial escape flights with frequencies of 7.1, 6.7, 8.0, and 8.6 beats per second, suggesting that wingbeat frequency from the Luneau video does not rule out a pileated woodpecker.

While both ivory-billed and pileated woodpeckers have black and white wings, they differ significantly in plumage pattern. Ivory-billed woodpeckers have white on the trailing edges of the dorsal and ventral surfaces, plus on the ventral covert feathers. Pileated woodpeckers have white only on the dorsal and ventral coverts. In flight, pileated woodpeckers have a very black appearance. (See this illustration for plumage differences.) The argument for the Luneau bird being an ivory-billed woodpecker boils down to the appearance of large white surfaces on both the dorsal and ventral surfaces of the wing. These white areas seem to extend to the wing's trailing edge. The Collinson paper shows that, in a low-quality video such as the Luneau video, a pileated woodpecker can take on characteristics that are superficially similar to an ivory-billed woodpecker. Further, the new pileated woodpecker videos resemble the Luneau video in several important respects. (A comparison of frames from the Luneau video with flying pileated woodpeckers can be found on pp. 29-31 of the provisional pdf, or in a jpg image here.)

It appears that the bird in the Luneau video is not necessarily an ivory-billed woodpecker rather than a pileated. Removing the Luneau video leaves sight reports and audio recordings as the remaining evidence for the woodpecker's survival. Neither would likely be accepted as sufficient evidence by a state or national records committee; the sightings are generally of poor quality, even though most reporters seem reliable, and the audio recordings do not eliminate other species completely. As Collinson points out, the video analysis does not mean that ivory-billed woodpeckers are extinct, but it does remove a key piece of evidence for their persistence.

Related materials:

The paper has also been covered by Nuthatch, Rob, GrrlScientist, BirdCouple, Bill, and Birder's World. The CLO posted its own detailed video analysis.

Earlier this week, I write about some ivory-billed woodpecker articles in the latest issue of Birding. See also my previous posts about ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Coverage

There is some interesting coverage of the ivory-billed woodpecker question in the latest issue of Birding, the ABA's bimonthly magazine. Among them is an historical look at the end of the Singer Tract population, the last ivory-billed woodpeckers to be reported and photographed without controversy. The article has interviews with some of the last living people to see the birds in that forest and old photographs from the area. It is available free online, here. The logging of the Singer Tract occurred about three decades short of the passage of the Endangered Species Act. One would hope that with the protection of that law, similar situations would not arise again.

Also, see The Great Debate, the results of a survey on perceptions of the evidence for ivory-billed woodpeckers. I participated in the survey, as did many others. The survey was probably not representative of birders as a whole. It suffers from the usual online survey problems of self selection. In addition, the survey was announced mainly through birding email lists and blogs. In the survey group, 83% were male, 58% had at least attended graduate school, and 97% considered themselves to have moderate or high level identification skills. Here are the results for whether the ivory-billed woodpecker exists:

Definitely does not exist: 4%
Probably does not exist: 27%
Possibly exists: 27%
Probably exists: 23%
Definitely exists: 21%

I forget how I answered the survey in September. My answer now would waver somewhere between a possibly and a probably exists. I am surprised that the "definitely does not exist" option received the fewest votes by far since the skeptical voices in the bird blogosphere have been quite loud, and the survey got a lot of promotion from them.

Woodpecker Spam

Two posts below received comments from one "bobby harrison" about an upcoming event. The comment was posted by someone using an AOL account at an unknown location. It seems that other bloggers have been receiving the same message, because both Birdchick and BINAC posted on this earlier today. I have no idea if this is the real person or not. Sharon seems to think it's real. It is just funny to be seeing comment spam about ivory-billed woodpeckers instead of mortgages and prescriptions.

Editorial on the Ivorybill Paper

An editorial in Avian Conservation and Ecology explains the decision of the editors to publish the paper by Hill et al. despite the lack of definitive evidence. They acknowledge the controversy around the question of whether ivory-billed woodpeckers persist, but argue that they have a responsibility to further an ongoing discussion.

What is that responsibility, more specifically? Consider the scientific method: observations about nature generate hypotheses and predictions that are subjected to further scrutiny. This leads, through strong inference (Platt 1964, Chamberlin 1965), either to falsification of the hypotheses, or an increase in our confidence that the hypotheses can account for the observations. In this case, the null hypothesis seems clear: Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are not present—in Arkansas, Florida, or anywhere else for that matter. Some advocates may treat the alternative hypothesis—that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are present, at least somewhere—as an article of faith, and skeptics will rightly point out that the evidence for this alternative hypothesis may be weak. From a scientific perspective, it seems safe to state that the observations do not allow rejection of the alternative hypothesis out of hand. Regardless, as Carl Sagan pointed out, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Hill et al. conclude that their evidence at least warrants an expanded search in space and time. We agree. “Harder” physical evidence, such as photographs, would enable an unequivocal rejection of the null hypothesis. If no such evidence ever materializes, despite an expanded search effort, the alternative hypothesis is assessed just the same. Furthermore, Hill et al. offer new forms of evidence (cavity size distributions, putative foraging sites) that can be assessed in other areas, including those in which Ivory-billed Woodpeckers clearly are absent. Thus, they provide both evidence consistent with the alternative hypothesis, and means to increase confidence in our inability to reject the null hypothesis. Science is a way of knowing, and knowing occurs either way.

Tags:

• Ivory-billed Woodpecker

More Ivorybill Links

The paper reporting on the Auburn-Windsor team's search in the Florida panhandle has now been posted at the Canadian journal Avian Conservation and Ecology. The article includes a detailed explanation of why the team believes the recordings match ivory-billed woodpeckers and not other birds such as blue jays or red-breasted nuthatches.

Sounds that resemble Ivory-billed Woodpecker kent calls are produced by Red-breasted Nuthatches (Sitta canadensis), White-breasted Nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis), gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), and Blue Jays (Cyanocitta cristata) (Jackson 2002, Tanner 1942), and may also be produced by Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias) (R. Charif, pers. comm.). Neither species of nuthatch was detected at our site, either by experienced human observers or on our remote sound recordings. Great Blue Herons are common along the Choctawhatchee River, but their occasionally kent-like calls could be distinguished because they were followed in sequence by repeats of their more common squawk-like calls. Gray squirrels, which are plentiful throughout our study site and produce a “chuck” call with harmonic structure similar to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s kent call, could be distinguished on the basis of a drawn-out squeal that follows the “chuck.” Blue Jays have immense vocabularies of vocalizations (Tarvin and Woolfenden 1999) and may be able to produce notes that closely resemble Ivory-billed Woodpecker kent calls (Charif et al. 2005). Such vocalizations are atypical sounds for Blue Jays and should not be their exclusive vocalizations. If Blue Jays were the source of our putative kent calls, then kent calls should be commonly associated with more familiar Blue Jay vocalizations. However, none of the 210 putative kent calls recorded by our listening stations were associated with any known Blue Jay vocalizations. Between December and March, Blue Jays were absent from the core study area and were detected only at the edges of the swamp next to pine (Pinus spp.) stands. Blue Jays were not detected within the core study area either by experienced human observers or by our listening stations until the end of March, at which time both humans and listening stations recorded the appearance of Blue Jays, especially at the periphery of the study area. Numerous putative kent calls were heard by human observers and recorded by listening stations in February and early March, when no Blue Jays were present.

As I noted in yesterday's post, the recordings of calls and knocks are presented on Mennill's site.

In addition, Geoffrey Hill's website now includes his report on the ivory-billed woodpecker search in Florida. The site includes a pdf of field notes from the 14 sightings and photographs of bark scaling on freshly dead trees in the river basin. Most sightings were recorded by Brian Rolek, one of Hill's students, and Tyler Hicks, a research assistant, had the most detailed sighting. At least one sighting by Rolek was of two birds flying together. Hill emphasizes that the evidence is not conclusive but also insists that the sightings are of real ivory-billed woodpeckers and that he is confident in the work of his team. There are plans to return to the Choctawhatchee River this winter, and the team is taking applications to form a larger search team than last winter's.

The Toronto Star has a story with more quotes from the searchers. Geoffrey Hill explained the absence of good photographs or video by the difficulty of raising and focusing a camera on a bird in flight.

"Each of us could have shot an Ivory-billed by now because we had time to raise a shotgun. But video cameras are really hard to point compared to binoculars and shotguns," Hill said in an interview.

And beware the twitchers.

Especially worrisome would be an invasion of so-called "twitchers," sometimes fanatical birders armed with high-power spotting scopes who play back recordings to entice rare birds to appear.

Those high-powered spotting scopes sure are dangerous.

Tags:

• Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Florida

Researchers are reporting evidence for the presence of ivory-billed woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River in Florida. Up to nine pairs may be breeding in the area. There have been 14 sightings by multiple observers, including of female woodpeckers. In addition, the searchers recorded audio of kent calls and double-knocks. Unfortunately no photographic or video documentation has been obtained. Until such happens, the findings are likely to be attacked by self-proclaimed skeptics. If nest sites do exist, and the researchers can find them, then visual documentation should be produced soon enough.

The search efforts were coordinated by Geoffrey Hill of Auburn University and Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor. Hill and Mennill have been more cautious in describing their findings than the Cornell team was with regard to the Arkansas sightings.

In a phone interview, Dr. Hill said only an indisputable photograph or DNA evidence would be scientifically conclusive. He said he knew how heated the subject of ivory bills had become, but asked, “Once we found them, what was I supposed to do?”

“The mistake,” he added dryly, “was ever looking for them.”

This report has been in the rumor mill for some time. An official announcement with more details on the sightings is set for tomorrow.

Update: An article from the Anniston Star (in Alabama) has much more detail on the search team and its findings. Geoffrey Hill and two research assistants made their first sightings in May 2005, and then returned to the area for prolonged searching in the winter of 2005-06. Apparently there are 210 recordings of kent calls and 99 of double knocks. The audio evidence was gathered at seven locations from December 2005 to April 2006, and then the recordings were searched for the audio signatures of ivory-billed woodpeckers, as well as more common animals. The sightings and recordings occurred in a section of the Florida panhandle that was not searched by James Tanner in his famous expeditions. This area has been cited by Jerome Jackson, among others, as having the best chance for ivory-billed woodpeckers in the southeast United States. An article describing the research is due to be published in Avian Conservation and Ecology.

Another update: Daniel Mennill has posted his page on the ivory-billed woodpecker search. The page includes sound files for all of the recordings made along the Choctawhatchee River. I listened to a few of the recordings, and in most cases the putative woodpecker sounds are faint and difficult to hear over the ambient noise.

The team is asking birders to stay out of the search site and look in other areas for the time being:

If we encounter birders in our study area, we will ask them to leave and suggest other areas to search. It is not worth endangering this small population of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers to try to get this bird on your life list. Our observations of bark scaling and large cavities from I-10 to the Choctawhatchee Bay suggest that ivorybills may be widespread in the Choctawhatchee River Basin, and there are many areas to explore outside of our small study area with great potential for ivorybills. Below, we suggest several places to search. If birders spread out, the impact on any given area will be small. If birders crowd into one spot, ivorybills will be driven out of that area. We ask that you put the interest of the bird first.

Tags:

• Ivory-billed Woodpecker
• Birds
• Conservation

Woodpecker Poll

Via BINAC, there is a poll on people's opinions of the ivory-billed woodpecker evidence. It seeks answers only from people who have seen the Luneau video and the video stills offered at the Fishcrow website. Offer your opinion if you have one. I have to say, as I mentioned at the BINAC site, that I found the questions about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster rather irrelevant. With the ivory-billed woodpecker, the question is whether a species that definitely once existed still persists in southern bottomland swamps. The other creatures are mythical beasts.

Speaking of ivory-billed woodpeckers, there seem to be some interesting rumors floating around the blogosphere, but until definite information is actually released, I am not going to speculate about their accuracy.

Also, Notes from Soggy Bottom has some thoughts on the Luneau video in a series of interlinked posts.

Tags:

• IBWO
• Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Still No Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The 2005-2006 search season has ended with no new sightings of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas. This winter and spring witnessed the most thorough search for an ivory-billed woodpecker yet, with hundreds of volunteers covering a carefully planned grid through the swampy woods. If this search failed to produce any new evidence, chances are that the bird is not there. Whether the original sightings were misidentified or whether the bird has left the area is an open question.

The CLO still has thousands of hours of audio recordings that have not been properly analyzed. Several observers reported hearing kent calls and double-knocks. Spectrographic analysis will be more reliable than field observation for determining if those were really produced by ivory-billed woodpeckers. But even those without solid field sightings will not be definitive.

Some will argue that the whole project was a waste of money. I have sympathy for that position because of recent draconian cuts in NPS and FWS budgets. However, if the lands around the Big Woods are permanently preserved, and if the search teams gathered data on more than the ivory-billed woodpeckers, the searches will have done some good, even if they failed in their ultimate objective. A few million dollars for the ivory-billed search is piddling compared with the billions being wasted in other areas of the federal budget, and it is those billions combined with an anti-public ideology that are the real cause of the crunch at the NPS and FWS.

Tags:

• Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Ivory-billed or Pileated?

David Luneau's video from the Arkansas swamp has caused much controversy regarding whether it shows an ivory-billed woodpecker or a pileated woodpecker. Birders and ornithologists have divided into two camps - "believers" and "skeptics." What we need is an objective way to determine which is right. Well, what better way to settle a digital dispute than Google? (Ivory-billed in blue, pileated in red)

Hmm, looks like a tie. I guess the argument will have to continue.

Tags:

• Trends

America's Most Endangered Birds

The National Audubon Society this week published online its list of the Top 10 Most Endangered Birds in North America. The list was published as a way to draw attention to recent proposals in Congress to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Here is the list (pdf):

1. Ivory-billed Woodpecker
2. California Condor
3. Whooping Crane
4. Gunnison Sage-Grouse
5. Kirtland’s Warbler
6. Piping Plover
7. Florida Scrub-Jay
8. Ashy Storm-Petrel
9. Golden-cheeked Warbler
10. Kittlitz’s Murrelet

Audubon's presentation highlights species across a range of bird families and with different habitat needs, showing the array of threats to birds and challenges to conservationists. The report includes a separate section listing the most endangered birds of Hawaii.

Like nuthatch, I wondered about the wisdom of leading the list with the ivory-billed woodpecker given the continuing controversy over the validity of the CLO's findings in Arkansas. But this list was prepared at some point last year; I received a pamphlet from NAS during the fall that had this list with the same species on it. I wonder why it took them so long to release this on their website.

Tags:

• Conservation

Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sounds

The researchers who documented the continued existence of ivory-billed woodpeckers in the Cache River NWR presented more evidence to back up their findings at the AOU conference today. The new evidence included audio recordings, which have now been made available on the internet at Cornell's website. (The site is rather slow right now.) The audio evidence, which helped persuaded skeptics, had not been available in April because the research team had not finished analyzing the recordings.

Update: Laura Erickson of BirderBlog is reporting on the ivory-bill issue from the AOU conference here and here.

Ivory-bill Developments

The New York Times reports that skeptics have withdrawn their objections to the report of ivory-billed woodpeckers in the Arkansas Big Woods. Drs. Prum and Robbins changed their minds after hearing audio recordings made by Cornell researchers of the woodpeckers' calls and double-knocking.

Ivory-bill Update

It appears that three biologists are about to publish a paper claiming that the bird seen in the Arkansas "Big Woods" was not an ivory-billed woodpecker, but instead was a leucistic (i.e., partial albino) pileated woodpecker. The argument centers around analysis of the film clip that was widely passed around the media and the internet, and which formed the basis for the Cornell team's proof of the bird's identity. The Cornell team is holding its ground and will publish a rebuttal.

For now, at least, I tend to trust the Cornell team's judgment. They were the ones on the scene who saw the bird(s), and appear to be well-regarded scientists and birders who would be risking their reputations if they were proved wrong. So I am sure that they were careful in their analysis. But there needs to be some arguments back and forth, and perhaps further exploration of the area.

Hedwig was the first among bloggers to break the news, but nuthatch has a longer analysis at the moment. I share the latter's concern that otherwise healthy skepticism regarding the sighting of the ivory-bill will be used as an excuse to halt habitat acquisition in the south. The current administration barely acts to help endangered and threatened species that are known to exist. And whether or not there really is a breeding population of ivory-bills in the "Big Woods," there are plenty of other species, such as the prothonotary warbler, that could use the habitat anyway. The public reaction will be key to what happens next.