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Having grown up in central Illinois I’ve long thought that both southern Illinois and southeast Missouri were actual possibilities for the IBWO, despite low attention paid to such locales (...and Bill Pulliam made us aware of western Tennessee as well).
Louisiana searcher Matt Courtman reports on one of the Facebook IBWO group pages that he will be searching in the S. Illinois area (which is part of the Cache River watershed) on Friday, November 6 (if he’s literally devoting just one day, not sure how extensive a look he'll get, but no doubt a fun area to explore and spend a day, with or without the prize).
He links to this 2010 'technical' paper from Jeff Hoover on the region/habitat:
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17081/INHS2010_29.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
In some other side news, someone else at the same FB group has mentioned the 2018 discovery of the Wondiwoi tree-kangaroo (previously assumed long-extinct). Almost every year it seems some believed-extinct creature is re-discovered, and I don’t usually bother mentioning such news, except that in this case it is a relatively large, strictly tree-dwelling animal, confined to small remote areas… hmmmm… sound familiar? I’ve hypothesized in the past that the difficulty of IBWO documentation may be that, over time, the species has become a largely arboreal bird (in remote areas) rarely coming down low or to the ground, and essentially remaining out-of-human-sight most of the time.
A couple of bits on the kangaroo here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wondiwoi_tree-kangaroo
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8 comments:
My goodness Cyber and poor Courtman. The study he links to was at least partially stimulated by the Sheridan hoax and Sheridans 'input" for a few years.
The area of Illinois they searched in that paper (Cache River and bordering contiguous forest) is rather narrow and fragmented.
I have no great risk in saying its close to impossible the area hosts any breeding Ivory-bills or any IBs at all.
tks SW
While the lack of an image of an IBWO does not negate the possibility
of one existing in the Cache River watershed in Illinois, we were unable to obtain any
photographic evidence in support of the unsubstantiated reports of sightings of IBWOs that have
come from the Cache River watershed in Illinois from 2005 to the present (see Appendix 2 for
panel review of the Sheridan Image).
One of our initial goals was to use the cameras in an attempt to determine amounts
tks SW
Researchers Forum has failed in its mission and still evidently is being operated by the same individuals.
After months of zero posts the moderator posts a 5 word useless dribble with a misspelling: "Excellent advise on this one."
The word is advice, Don. The IB situation needed a very competent, savvy, media presence. Forum management failed the main mission. They mislead, with dishonesty combined with no strategy.
TIA
Bird
Lazy pedant could create his own forum.
That poster was lazy? You provided only a one sentence defense of how the forum was run. In a way you support that the forum was operated poorly; it is indefensible hence you attack the poster.
You have no clue evidently; results do not matter I suppose?
The forum was run incorrectly from the beginning; they never understood (or purposely mislead)) all that this was not a critically rare species.
Their flowery and ridiculous introduction--- "thought close to extinction but today a much brighter picture is being painted" was immediately noticed as being dangerously optimistic.
This attitude produced the harmful rule there that everything was rosy and the community only needed to hold hands, bird and report sightings to the forum and it would all work out.
Whenever posters said "more has to be done" they were banned and censored by these fools.
Where are we today? The forum produced these results by confusing sightings of very few birds with a stable population. It invited everyone over and inferred it in would only take a few days in the woods with your kids, cameras while holding hands with each other and the species was back.
No commonsense, no ecological knowledge and no leadership there.
thank you
As one who criticizes spelling and word choice of others you should look up the definitions of infer and imply to use them correctly.
Only a handful of posts on Researchers Forum in about 5 months, pretty bad. About the only thing you were encouraged and allowed to do on that site was report sightings and there aren't any sightings......now what?
The last thread was "what do you do if you get a picture?". You can't make this up. The bird is on the verge of extinction and they still think 1) a picture on one bird is the solution 2) they are going to get a picture after 100,000 + field hours with no unequivocal picture.
When you rely on websites, weak forums, cameras and weekend warriors instead of targeted habitat management what do you expect?
SW22
I agree that things look dire but of course the bird has a large range. Talented searchers found a few birds rather quickly though.
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