Myron Wasiuta has posted on YouTube the below brief flight of a departing Pileated Woodpecker:
This may well be the first such video I’ve seen that shows in at least some individual frames the sort of broad white visual effects that Sibley/Jackson/et.al. posited in critiquing the Luneau video. Hard to compare completely since angles/heights/speed vary somewhat, and only certain frames pertain, but still interesting (Luneau video below):
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1 comment:
:Houston Ghostbirder" emails me the following comment [apologies, I thought I had turned comments back on over a year ago! but HG informed me they were still off, so no idea how many others have been missed :( ]:
Broadly white visuals aside, there's a distinct difference in flight mechanics between the pileated in Wasiuta's video and the subject in Luneau video. The pileated folds wings completely under body multiple times relatively early in the flight, transitioning to the common cruising mode. That is in obvious contrast with the flight of the Luneau bird, which shows only one "bounding" event in nearly thirty flaps, according to Bill Pulliam's analysis. http://bbill.blogspot.com/2011/11/imperial-film.html
So rather than supporting the skeptic position that the Luneau bird was a pileated, the new pileated video seems to to further Pulliam's conclusion that the Luneau bird is in fact an Ivorybill.
Has anyone compared wing length to body width proportions of the Luneau bird with pileated? Seems to me, with just naked eye viewing, that the Luneau bird has a higher wing to body width ratio.
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