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The Facebook Ivory-bill group is straining under the weight of its now 5400+ members, maybe 5500 by the time you finish reading this post 😃 (and plenty of others stop by the site who aren’t even members). Between the repetition and talking in circles, the pseudoscience, sock puppets, and trolling, the hype and lame speculation, the sarcasm, mockery, squabbling, and snark, the spam, biases, inconsistencies, wishful thinking, sundry mumbo-jumbo, naivete or non-credibility, cringy posts, and clumsy, hard-to-follow platform organization, it can be difficult to get through a day of perusing threads! (though there is occasional comic relief!); sometimes I even find comments or an entire thread from 2 or 3 days prior that I totally missed somehow -- and at the current rate of IBWO reports being written, shouldn't be too long before the states with IBWO reports will outnumber those without any (...okay, I kid... slightly; ohhh, and, glory be, even Carolina Parakeets have now been reported by a poster).
With all that said though, every day somewhere I find at least one interesting comment or thought, even if buried amidst the avalanche of other verbiage (HERE'S another Chuck Hunter comment I enjoyed, if only because it paid tribute to Bill Pulliam (deceased), who's past efforts, and logic, on BirdForum.net and on his own blog in earlier days, have been missed by many of the more recent entrants to this debate. There are of course other interesting comments, pictures, data, links etc. from time to time, and only a small percentage of the 5400 members take a very active part. Understandably, a LOT of lurkers.
The lone Administrator of the site has taken some heat lately for not moderating the group more, but assuming he has a job and a life ;) moderating a large, active Facebook group in a consistent, fair way can be exceedingly difficult. [Addendum: the lone moderater, Dwight Norris, has now, as of 6/28, put folks on notice that he DOES plan to be a little more 'hands-on' in moderating the group going forward, primarily asking for civility. I sympathize with him.]
And one ought also keep in mind that the whole FB platform was put together by Mr. Zuckerberg primarily for the purpose of capturing eyeballs, not to necessarily capture truth, facts, science, knowledge, reality, or anything else of the like which sometimes seem accidental byproducts. Fantasy, hope, and controversy seem better adapted at capturing eyeballs — with that said, if/when the IBWO is ever documented it will be, with all the false starts, one of the biggest science stories in zoological history… with a lot of explaining to do and a lot of egg-on-the-face to go around.
Anyway, FB is the main thing we have on the Web these days in the way of regular IBWO discussion; it’s just unfortunately sparse of biological or zoological scientists, as a percentage of total members. May not even matter since the two main sides of the debate are so polarized at this point that there is little room for deep “discussion” (indeed many “believers” on the site keep voicing the wish that deniers and skeptics not even take part, or be banned) -- interesting how the internet, which could be a fantastic tool for pulling people together, turns out instead to be perhaps the most powerful engine ever created for deeply polarizing people on virtually any unsettled topic. :((
I'll also reiterate (warn) what I've said for 6 months that we are reaching the point of being ripe or overdue for yet another hoax (forensically, they are usually easily uncovered, but still folks will try). The year is almost half over; will we really get through the rest of the year without one?
Lastly, a recent hot (disagreeable) topic over at FB has been equipment for getting a photo of an IBWO in a brief (flyby) encounter. Even with modern technology, the chance of getting such a photo that is definitive is likely slim and none; spend however much money you want, you are likely to get from useless, crappy, to suggestive but fuzzy and NONdefinitive photos/video of fleeing IBWOs ... SO I'll say for the umpteenth time, these birds must feed (forage) EVERY day, they must enter and leave roostholes EVERY day, and they will spend a significant chunk of a year at, around, or creating nestholes. We only need to identify such sites, then have them monitored closely by a human or an automatic, remote camera, to get the necessary photos (Matt Courtman, I think is stressing this approach in his search, but his is a small team)... such sites may be much higher in the canopies then we often look, but still ought be findable, especially in winter, IF the species exists (admittedly, this approach has repeatedly, and disappointingly, failed in the past, even with Cornell's larger-scale, transect-like search). In the current state of affairs, all the fleeting glances, brief encounters, auditory signs, fuzzy film, and data analysis will not make up for the failure to simply capture the living bird doing things it must do each and every day of each and every month throughout the year, including simply perching on a limb or trunk.
Anyway, I say all this to impress upon people why skeptics are so entrenched and adamant in their stances -- from their perspective, the excuses, reasons, explanations of believers sound all-too-similar to those who would argue that the moon landings were fake or 9/11 was an 'inside' job -- such folks have counter-explanations (including 'scientific' ones) for almost every argument one can make to say the moon landings were real or Al Queda was fully responsible for 9/11 (...but hey, I don't wanna get into THAT discussion, and no, of course the analogy is not ideal). But one more analogy: when powerball lotteries run there is high anticipation but if there are no winners the $$$ prize simply continues to grow, often massively, with each new contest. So too, the longer this whole debate runs, with each passing year the greater will be the astonishment and scientific amazement (...and indeed 'prizes') if-ever/whenever the IBWO is conclusively confirmed.
Something akin to “proof” of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (or as one FBer aptly called it, "Schrodinger's Woodpecker") will either appear in the next 20 years… or, NOT. Meanwhile, I suspect that as this year drags on without much solid IBWO news, the FB membership & chatter will at some point plateau (maybe ~6400 members) and then begin declining…. until, maybe, perhaps, just when you've begun to doze off, there is yet another surprise unforeseen announcement. ...always be prepared for a bit of a wild ride.
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ADDENDUM 6/24:
A very nice, new, longish post from Mark Michaels of Project Principalis detailing several of the old, ‘extra’ IBWO reports from areas beyond or tangential to the normally-given range for the species. This is, for obvious reasons, an important and under-emphasized topic, even if many of these reports cannot be verified or further studied:
As Mark writes at one point after relating all these reports:
“This might only be of historical interest but for the fact that reports from these seemingly peripheral or 'out of range' locations have continued into the 21st-century (USFWS 2010, Appendix E). When such claims are made by citizens they are routinely dismissed, if not mocked. There is no way to ascertain how many potentially credible reports from this region have been ignored over decades.”
Indeed, with so many of the 'traditional' haunts of the species having been somewhat scoured over decades (without much success), it is fair to wonder if such a strong-flying, and likely nomadic, species may have simply adapted to habitat (that has been less explored) elsewhere when necessary.
[p.s.... I add this as an Addendum here, in part because Mark linked to it from the Facebook group page.]
