-- 'Dogness' etc.... --

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Suppose you see someone walking down the street accompanied by a 4-legged furry, tail-wagging critter; it's specific shape and color pattern may be different from any animal you've ever seen before... and YET you recognize it as a dog... NOT a cat, not a cow, not a goat, or horse, nor coyote, wolf, or fox, but a DOG. There are a bajillion types of dogs, and yet upon seeing one we pretty automatically know it is a dog, even if we can't recognize the breed or mix. How do we do that!?? It may not help a lot, but some would say that dogs simply have the quality of "dogness," difficult to define precisely, but still recognizable in a split-second, once ingrained in our psyche (in fact, try to come up with a verbal description/definition of dogs that would allow a stranger who's never seen one to consistently identify them, yet not call a fox a dog; it ain't easy).
Another long-time mystery of perception is how we humans are able to quickly recognize from a distance a sibling, parent, friend, etc. in different attires, under so many varying conditions/contexts, and from different angles.

Or this: take out a piece of blank paper and without looking draw from memory a detailed picture of your television set, refrigerator, washer/dryer, or similar common object/appliance in your living quarters. I'm betting your best effort will be hugely devoid of accurate detail even though you see these objects every single day, and if you walked in one afternoon and somebody had substituted a different refrig, TV, etc. for yours you would immediately notice it.

The point is, that perception is very much a kind of 'gestalt;' we routinely perceive things as a whole, and quite instantly at that, not by their components. Ivory-bills CAN be ID'd in but seconds, by gestalt, just like thousands of other bird ID's that take place every week across the land... or like recognizing your own refrigerator. In birding it's called "giss" or "jizz" or "the Cape May school," (and thank you Pete Dunne for making more people aware of it, even though they've always done it unconsciously). That doesn't mean every Ivory-bill claim is accurate; it means that people who know what IBWOs and PIWOs look like, and who are experienced with the latter, do have the ability to recognize when a large black-and-white woodpecker is NOT a Pileated, leading to one alternative.

It reminds me of the heated debate in American education over the "phonics" method versus the "look-say" method of teaching reading. In "phonics," children are taught to learn words by sounding out phonetic components of individual letters and stringing them together (even though English has a LOT of phonetic inconsistencies). In the "look-say" method children are taught words as wholistic entities based on repetitively seeing them and on sentence context. Both sides have strong arguments and data to support them. But here's the thing, whichever way one learns 'reading' initially, once it is learned one uses the wholistic manner to DO it. No adult reads by focusing in on letters or phonemes (it would take half-a-lifetime to read one Harry Potter volume in that manner!).
Similarly, field marks are a fine learning tool, as well as useful in a multitude of individual cases, but the vast majority of bird IDs simply are NOT made by checking off field marks. Birding is an art and a skill, not a science, and anal-compulsively applying field marks to bird identification, lends a scientific-sounding veneer to the discussion, but in fact misses the reality of how perception and most bird recognition operates.
Skeptics will counter with example after example after example of documented mistaken IDs over the years, but those examples exist and are noteworthy precisely because they are the exceptions-to-the-rule --- for every missed ID due to mis-read field marks by birders there are 100s of correct IDs done on a moment's basis; that is precisely why bird counts are useful and valuable, even though they lack scientific rigor or validation --- enough birders get it right, enough of the time. The same birder who undergoes an inquisition for reporting a single Ivory-bill, can report 65 different species on a Christmas count without any questioning of his/her competency/veracity whatsoever. If birders were as mistake-prone as skeptics sometimes imply, there'd be no point to conducting bird counts; they'd simply be junk science. As it is, they may be in recent parlance, "faith-based ornithology"... but they are not junk.

I've said from early on in this affair that what was most important was NOT IBWO sounds, nor signs, nor the Luneau video, but sightings (the very essence of birding) from credible people, and over the years we've had enough of these, from different places in different circumstances and contexts, to strain the probability that ALL of them are false. Unfortunately though, as with so much in life, probabilities, in the Ivory-bill arena, remain in the eye of the beholder.
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