-- Catching Up A Bit --

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Dan Mennill is back in his home lab and posted this update regarding processing of Auburn's acoustic data:

http://web2.uwindsor.ca/courses/biology/dmennill/IBWO/IBWO07News.html

FWIW, a reader sends me a note they received from the ACONE folks in the Big Woods (in charge of the automatic sky viewing camera) saying they are still sorting through a huge volume of data and will have a new update to their findings in the "next couple of months."

This article on the Texas search for Ivory-bills leads to a speculative piece (pdf) on the IBWO's persistence:

http://www.houstonaudubon.org/screenprint.cfm?newsletterid=799

a reader sends in this depressing link to the destruction of cypress forest in Louisiana:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=3166801

(...as if I weren't already depressed enough!!)

For the Ivory-billed Woodpecker aficionado who has (almost) everything, a toilet seat offered on eBay here :-)))

--- If anything like last summer, could be quite awhile (Oct./Nov.???) before we get a final report from Cornell on their latest AR. search efforts (hey kids, can you spell "S-L-O-W"?). And there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether the South Carolina folks will release their final search report to the public or not. Auburn may be the first out of the gate with some sort of summary if they don't wait for all acoustic data to be processed. Skeptics continue to run with whatever limited tidbits pop up on the Web, but really a lot of watching and waiting yet to do, prior to next season's search and the efforts of independents. The same old arguments keep getting rehashed, settling nothing. Search the pertinent areas, evaluate sighting reports, and collect/assess peripheral evidence --- plenty of all that left to do (science can be tedious).

...and from one of the great naturalists of 20th century America, T. Gilbert Pearson, this quote (April 1933, National Geographic Magazine):

"The supreme moment of my life as a bird student came in May, 1932, when in a great primeval forest in northern Louisiana, I saw, for the first time, a living ivory-billed woodpecker... The ivory-bill is decidedly larger than the pileated, and this difference in size is very apparent, as we had ample opportunity to observe, when by chance birds of both species fed at the same time on a tall decayed stump within 80 feet of our hiding place."

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