-- Just For Fun --

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The last week has put me in a bad mood (well, a worser mood! ;)... so perhaps time for a little jest:

Occasionally I'm asked what it would take to convince me that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are in fact extinct. I addressed this question once long ago with a ‘Top Ten’ list. So, maybe a good time to update that:

Top Ten things that might persuade me Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are extinct:

10. In a hastily-called press conference, Matt Courtman announces he has seen 3 Carolina Parakeets and 1 Dodo in the Tensas Wildlife Refuge, but thus far, not a single Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

9.  Donald Trump says he saw an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

8. A dead Ivory-bill is discovered in the woods with a 45-caliber revolver next to it, and a note reading, "Good-bye cruel world, I have no friends, no future, and dangit no first-growth virgin, beetle-infested, bottomland forest remaining."

7. Cornell and Auburn make a surprise announcement at the next A.O.U. meeting that they have jointly documented a small population of Moas residing deep in the heart of Staten Island (...though the videotape is a tad fuzzy).

6. Little beknownst to northern Yankees, it turns out that constructing and flying paper-mache models of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers has been a long-standing pastime of Southern schoolchildren ever since 1953.

5. An unannounced raid of David Sibley's painting studio by Federal agents finds shelves and shelves and shelves of stuffed Ivory-billed carcasses with time, date, and place of collection meticulously recorded… BUT, none more recent than Sept., 1969.

4. A behavioral field ecologist from a major Ivy League university discovers unexpectedly that the favorite prank of Pileated Woodpeckers (after a few too many fermented berries), is to dress up like an Ivory-bill and go swooping through the woods, screaming "kent-kent-kent" instead of "kuk-kuk-kuk."

3. The FBI discovers that all the hoopla on the Web over the Ivory-bill is nothing more than a highly-organized, targeted Russian disinformation campaign intended to divide and conquer the American people (...AND, it seems to be working!)

2.  Algorithmic analysis proves that 94% of the posters at Facebook’s 'Ivory-bills Rediscovered' site are actually just sock puppets of Mark Zuckerberg.

1. A snowball makes its way through Hell unscathed.

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ADDENDUM 7/3:

[...And for those who don't already know, the word "gullibility" doesn't even exist in the dictionary.]