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Hugely annoying that after all this time people continue posting pics and videos on YouTube, forums, news pages, and other websites labelled as Ivorybills that are clearly Pileated Woodpeckers… every time I get perturbed by one of these mis-IDs I have to stop and remember how many uncorrected pics are now floating around the Web easily leading innocent people further astray, and never getting corrected. It feeds the trope that EVERY clear picture of a large U.S. woodpecker is, lo-and-behold, a Pileated, and IBWOs come only in a fuzzy variety...
One rainy day, a while ago, I looked up “Ivory-billed Woodpecker” under the ‘image’ category of a couple of search engines, and did some rough math: close to 4% of the images appearing were obviously Pileated Woodpeckers — this wasn’t a scientific survey or measurement, and I suspect the larger, more reputable sites get it right more often than that (it’s the smaller sites and press outlets that mess up most, but NOT always). 4% of pics being wrong isn't a huge amount… but enough to create never-ending exasperation.
And THIS is aggravating: once many years ago I wrote a reputable, well-trafficked site about a mislabelled PIWO pic they had used in a widely-viewed article, and asked them to correct it. The response I got was that they had taken the picture from another site, so it wasn’t their fault that it was mislabelled, and besides the two species look almost alike, so for purposes of the article and their readers it really didn’t matter much! (no, they didn’t correct the caption) — that is the mentality we’re often up against folks!…
Oy vey (another recent example).....
[...By the way, for anyone needing to ingrain in their mind the look of Pileated Woodpeckers, this Facebook group offers lots of pics & videos of this wonderful species:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/74736493236 ]
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