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While biding time, figure it might be worth mentioning again a topic discussed here long ago and recently brought up over at the “Ivory-billed Woodpecker — Re-discovered” Group on Facebook, which is Noel Snyder’s ‘alternative hypothesis’ for the decline of the IBWO (focusing on human predation, instead of habitat loss). Respected ornithologist Snyder wrote of his hypothesis over a dozen years ago in a lengthy monograph, which I don’t believe is available on the internet (other than through a paywall)? He did make the same arguments later in book-form in “The Travails of Two Woodpeckers: Ivory-bills and Imperials.”
Anyway, Geoffrey Hill wrote a review of the monograph back at the time here:
Birder Gary Graves also chimed in on it on the Arkansas listserv as I reported in this old posting:
The point of all this being that IF habitat loss was not as major a force in this species' decline as Tanner led people to believe, than the species' chance of surviving through the bottleneck of the 1940s was that much greater. I'd like to say 'time will tell,' though it is always possible that time has run out.
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