Tuesday, April 29, 2008

-- April Ends --

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Artist, writer, speaker, Indy film aficionado, and sometime birder, David Sibley, was recently spotted at a film festival showing of Alex Karpovsky's docu-drama about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, perhaps satiating his discreet infatuation with the elusive nemesis species ;-))) :

http://www.picusblog.com/2008/04/woodpecker-movie.html

The film's next showing, BTW,
will be this coming weekend, May 4, during the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, for any others similarly obsessed...

Meanwhile, Cornell's Mobile Team has updated their travel log. Annoyingly, they continue to chatter much about non-IBWO related matters, while revealing little as to their judgment of various habitat and locales. I assume places visited are being scored or ranked in some manner as to their suitability for Ivory-bills and the advisability of more intensive future searches, but from the log posts one can hardly tell if this is the case... or is it possible they are not finding any areas worthy of further time and effort??? A lot remains to be sorted out for next year's scaled-back efforts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I saw "Woodpecker" last night at the University of Baltimore. It's a very entertaining movie - sort of a mockumentary with a mix of the real interviews and fictitious events and characters.

One real event I'd never heard of before (apparently real) was an $80K birding platform/bridge that was built near Brinkley to encourage eco-tourism. It burned down -- suspected arson -- only a couple of weeks after it was completed. Karpovsky noted that it got very little media attention as the locals didn't want to discourage birders from coming to Brinkley.

Although the movie doesn't take a stand on whether the rediscovery was real or not, Karpovsky himself indicated in a Q&A afterwards that he doesn't believe it and cynically noted that "a lot of people made a lot of money" on events around the rediscovery.

Again, the movie was entertaining and I recommend it, but Karpovsky is 100% city boy, and not a birder or even having anything close to naturalist sympathies so don't expect a nature film.

Less than 20 people attended the showing last night.