Monday night's (Oct. 8) NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams is scheduled to run a short unfavorable piece on the dollars expended by the Federal Government in search of the Ivory-billed in Arkansas. Oy veyyy... People continue to bandy about the $27 million figure from the Draft Recovery Plan (...uhhh, that would cover how many minutes in Baghdad?). This figure is actually for the 5-year period running from 2006 to 2010, and theoretically, according to the proposed schedule, half or more of it will already have been spent by the end of this year.
Maybe also worth noting that US F&W has proposed spending $150 million over four decades on the recovery of the Western Snowy Plover.
Meanwhile, over at Ivory-billed Researchers' Forum, "Sidewinder" has posed the question of 'how many active Pileated nests are being found' by participants during their searches for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Tanner originally roughly estimated there could be 36 Pileated pairs in a given area inhabited by a single Ivory-billed pair... just to put some perspective on things.
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Addendum --- from the Web Grab Bag:
This interesting post from "DC Birding Blog" on detailed old field notes (from 1920's) recently discovered describing the Javan Lapwing of Indonesia, not documented to exist since 1940. Pertinent quotes as follows:
"These records come from areas with no previous reports of Javan Lapwings and suggest that these birds may have wider habitat preferences than was previously thought."
and,
"If it still exists the population of Javan Lapwings must be tiny and work needs to be carried out immediately to survey all potential areas."--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
