-- Florida IBWO Webpage/ Addendum --

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Dr. Geoff Hill's IBWO webpage appears to be back up at same URL used yesterday (can't tell at a quick glance what changes/updates there may be), but assume this is the updated version. It includes a link to their online journal article.

Having a lot of problems this morning uploading posts on Blogger --- great timing Blogger ! : - (((
I know some others around the country are having same difficulty, so not sure how often I'll be on today, but at some point today or tomorrow will try to summarize the Florida findings. In the meantime read and digest... For others having same difficulty I did have some luck switching from Firefox to a different browser just for uploading purposes, FWIW.

===> Addendum: those interested in APPLYING FOR POSITIONS with the search team can go directly to this page for application info:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/science_math/cosam/departments/biology/faculty/webpages/hill/ivorybill/Join.html

Also, just realized that the first issue of the online journal in which Dr. Hill's paper appears contains an additional Ivory-bill article (essay) on saving the the species' habitat:

http://www.ace-eco.org/vol1/iss1/art6/

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-- More Reading --

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Given that we have yet to see a summary report of last season's Arkansas search come out of Cornell yet, good article here on the past and upcoming more-streamlined Cornell efforts:

http://www.cornellsun.com/node/18563

If you like being able to say "I read it in The New York Times" you can peruse their initial (somewhat weak) coverage of the Florida find here (requires free registration), but hardly worth bothering with since the Anniston article below is MUCH better.

Also, for anyone interested in a one-year position in South Carolina take a look at this post over on Birdchick's blog requesting applicants for an Ivory-bill search leader in prime S.C. locales:

http://www.birdchick.com/2006/09/ivory-billed-woodpecker-job.html

no doubt there will be many more coverages of the Florida news in next day or two, but once Dr. Hill's webpage is posted (soon) I probably won't cite very many other references unless they truly add additional news or perspective to the story.
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-- News Article --

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While awaiting the re-posting of Dr. Hill's Florida IBWO-sightings website it is worth reading this nice, extensive coverage of the announcement in the Anniston Star newspaper (if you need a registration to open the article you can get a free 24-hour trial under the "services" section). Some good quotes and additional info:

http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2006/as-columns-0925-jflemingcol-6i25u1829.htm

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-- The Florida Announcement + Addendum--

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The announcement of Ivory-bills found in Florida was, by mistake, briefly posted on the internet today 24 hours earlier than intended. It has since been removed and I assume will be re-posted on Tues. as originally intended. Even though many saw the site and have begun reporting on it, following the original plan I will leave out most details and simpy relay in a general way what will be found there:

multiple sightings of Ivory-bills by multiple individuals, including 10 sightings by one individual alone, have been recorded within a small area on the Florida panhandle over about a 15-month period; these include a clear sighting of a female in flight by Tyler Hicks (as most know, FEMALE sightings are particularly significant in IBWO reports). There have also been a significant number of detections of Ivory-bills by sound, both by humans on site and by automatic recorders. Scrapings and large cavities also recorded.

However, due to the current lack of adequate video/photographic evidence or direct DNA evidence the authors are unable to call their find absolutely definitive at this point in time, although they themselves are confident of the presence of Ivory-bills and obviously searching will proceed this winter. Many skeptics who now have a very vested interest in Ivory-bills never being found or confirmed will no doubt latch onto this lack of videotape to continue their cause. The team involved will be releasing all of their evidence for public perusal (except for the precise location of the sightings, for obvious reasons), and will be further presenting the evidence both in publication form and at the AOU meeting next week. Assuming their IBWO website is re-posted tomorrow I will link to it at that time, possibly with further comment (or I may have no further comment 'til after the AOU presentation).

Addendum: I've been informed the website mistakenly posted today is also an OUTDATED version with some old information; so tomorrow morning please be sure and link to the updated version (I assume this means possibly a new URL).
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-- The N.C. Chainsaw Massacre --

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This article isn't about Ivory-bills, but it does give some indication of why any discovery of Ivory-bills can't just be announced willy-nilly to the public in the manner a lot of cynics might like to have done. A lot of preparation and planning (months if not well over a year) must precede any such announcement... why?... because homo sapiens are boobs... read away.
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-- Fitzpatrick Talk --

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This article tells a little about the talk Ivory-bill sighter Jim Fitzpatrick gave at the Meadowlands a week ago. One passage caught my eye:

"How the bird survived is the $64,000 question," he said. "The speculation is that while all of the bird's habitat was being removed, parts of the ivory billed woodpecker population were driven into the heart of the big thickets in Texas. There, away from people, it could have been breeding for decades"

I've never heard this "theory" put forth before and don't know where it stems from. Personally, I have some doubts that any Ivory-bills remain in the Big Thicket, but wish this winter's searchers there the best of luck. What seems likely to me is that Ivory-bills have been breeding in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi all the while, and surviving along the bottomland river corridor system that links these states (and in many minds, of course, S. Carolina remains highly viable as well). The more intriguing question, by far though, is just how far north (in locales possibly rarely ever searched) might they have established themselves? In that regard folks may want to be on the lookout for an Ohio publication cited in this internet posting which apparently will discuss some of the historical evidence for the Ivory-bill in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.
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-- Final Note on Field Techs --

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To those of you who sent me your names/qualifications for the winter (NON-Cornell) IBWO study and have not heard anything back yet here is an update: as presumed, the P.I. is currently "swamped," not actively hiring at this moment, but will be soon. When the official announcement-of-the-finding is made there will be simultaneously a call for field techs; I would guess they'll be asking for a full resume and letter(s) of recommendation at that time. Watch for that notice (it should be easy to spot, and I'll no doubt link to it as well); when you see it respond with whatever is requested directly to the signified individual (some of you sent me fairly extensive 'blurbs' that were passed on, but an official resume will likely still be wanted). To the extent that there are qualified individuals who can free up enough time to take part in this project I'd expect the competition for slots to be significant. I'm already very excited for 2 people (including 1 personal acquaintance) who are joining the project team, and would love to see others of my readers get picked for this historic endeavor (...except uhhh, Tom Nelson probably need not apply, even though he reads me absolutely religiously).
Have a splendid weekend all; leaves are falling, it's a marvelous time of year... and, it's a marvelous time to be a birder in America.
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-- Annie Dillard/ Mike Collins --

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From the ridiculous yesterday ("Ivory Bill Jones") to the sublime today --- a passage, just for the heck of it, by Annie Dillard from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Chapter 2, entitled "Seeing" ) :

"Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before your eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don't-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally, I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown.
"....Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.' "

===> AND, on a separate note, Mike Collins arrived back in the Stennis/Pearl River area (La.) yesterday for a new winter search season and reported back to BirdForum a tad cryptically as follows:

"This morning, I saw some very, very exciting data. As I mentioned several months ago, studying the ivorybill is going to be like studying a new species. Some of the data that I saw this morning is unlike anything I have ever seen in the field or in the literature. It's downright fascinating."

I assume, but don't know for certain, that this has to do with data to be presented soon at AOU, for which there may be a news release or publication in the week prior to the Veracruz meeting (unsure). Given how few Ivory-bills have been studied in the past, and how long ago the last ones were recorded one might well expect MUCH new (even surprising) information/data to arise. As previously stated here, two of the bigger problems in IBWO discussions are simply 1) how much we don't know with certainty, and 2) how much we think we do know, that is wrong or incomplete. James Tanner's study, as good as it was, simply handed us for decades afterwards an illusion of knowledge that never was that solid. Good luck in the season ahead Mike.
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-- Will the Fun Never End --

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If you're looking for a respite from the occasional IBWO rancor in some quarters you can check out "Ivory Bill Jones'" saga of his search for an Ivory-bill for a quickie chuckle. I previously linked to part 1 of his effort a little while back and since then he's out with parts 2 & 3:

part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78AFGvhLiIE&mode=related&search=

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjHYkV7m-q4

part 3: http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2772775

and his homepage is here: http://www.ivorybillwatcher.com/

....keep 'em comin' Bill
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-- Fun Tricks --

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In some corners of the Web, I'm seeing some opportunistically-timed, strategic backpedalling by card-carrying members of the negative, scoffing, cynical, shallow, contentious, obstructionist, CYA, all-knowing, circular-reasoning, logic-challenged, video-obsessed, Ivory-bill extinctionist-and-abandonment crowd lately. Backpedalling when you're plummeting off a cliff is a neat trick... But, hey, seriously, this debate is actually far, far from over; just headed for a new turn.
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-- Ivory-bill Shoppers --

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Here's the current eBay page for Ivory-billed Woodpecker wares, just on the off-chance you want to stock up on any items ahead of any possible future news or pronouncements.

And totally separately, here is an item I've picked out specially just for the resolute cynics out there to bid on and use ; - ) In fact if they're in a shopping mood they may as well pick up a few of these (from another site) for friends and family as well.
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-- Tanner Again --

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The locale where Ivory-bills will be announced at the Oct. AOU meeting was never visited by James Tanner, and one has to wonder how many other such sites his 'definitive' study completely missed, especially since he didn't have the benefit of aerial photography. Tanner's monograph on Ivory-bills is often referred to as a 3-year study, but by his own admission he only spent 21 months in the South, and a lot of that time was travelling on the road and engaging locals in conversation for information-gathering. Over 10 months alone were spent solely at the Singer Tract where all of his personal observations were made, leaving less than 11 months for a single individual to cover the entire remainder of the south -- essentially an impossibility for anyone to do today adequately, with good roads, better/lighter equipment, and far fewer key areas to explore, and truly an impossibility in Tanner's day (indeed, he likely spent more hours in the front seat of a car on dusty, bumpy rural roads of the 1930's South than he did trampling through any actual Ivory-bill habitat outside of La.).
Tanner claimed he visited 45 locales in that time (actually, some of them were adjacent to one another, so it's debatable if they could justly be called separate locales), but only spent a week or more in about 5 of them; the rest usually got only a 1-to-4 day visit, hardly enough time for adequate exploration of large forest tracts. In the end he only observed birds at the Singer Tract (thanks to a guide who led him to them) -- statistically, not only was it a wholly inadequate sample size, it was not a random sample of IBWOs either, and of course it was never replicated -- these are rather minimal scientific requirements. While Tanner gathered some other anecdotal and occasionally more empirically-based information along the way to throw into his mix, still there was little solid basis for the generalizations and conclusions that would follow his work. As I've often said, his is a wonderful, fascinating, and astute study of a handful of birds, but a largely inadequate and incomplete study of an entire species.
It is somewhat revealing that people will try so hard to tear down the work of Cornell University in the Big Woods of Arkansas with wholly-unproven and debatable arguments, yet blithely accept the narrow findings of a single lowly grad student from 60+ years ago, and moreover assume those findings still hold today if they ever did. If searchers ever thoroughly explore all of the appropriate habitat out there no telling what they may find, while cynics busy themselves with their pre-formulated armchair analysis. In their typical manner many of them are already deriding (pre-deriding?) the evidence to be announced in Veracruz without having seen it (more good empirical technique -- this applies to some, of course not all, the skeptics). It has reached a point that some of them must quietly hope and wish that the Ivory-bill is extinct in order to save face (their claims to the contrary are disingenuous and whenever IBWOs are confirmed, it will be fun to watch their faux excitement). It is a point, needless to say, we ought never have reached.
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-- Ivory-bill Update Next Week --

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For anyone in the LSU area next week, Jon Andrew, chair of the Steering Committee of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Recovery Team, will be giving a talk entitled simply, "Ivory-billed Woodpecker Update" on Wed., Sept. 20, for the Baton Rouge Audubon Society at LSU's Hilltop Arboretum. General public welcome.
I presume this will be an "update" specifically on Cornell's efforts (previous and upcoming), and not include much if any of the information that will be announced at the October AOU meeting, which is spearheaded by a different academic team altogether (although Cornell knows of it). If any reader in attendance thinks something new or interesting is discussed, though, feel free to send it along to me for blog inclusion.

Quite a bit farther off, Cornell's Ken Rosenberg will be the keynote speaker on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker for North Carolina's "Wings Over Water" Festival at Nags Head, NC. on Nov. 10, 2006.
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-- Extant Rhino! --

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Following up from where I left off yesterday, one of my alert readers (...as Dave Barry would say) passed along a week-old article on the recent discovery of the Sumatran Rhino, which includes this passage:

"This sighting and rare photos and video documenting the Sumatran rhino in its natural habitat is indeed very exciting. We have been tracking these animals here in Sabah for almost ten years now, and although we have seen tracks and signs of these rhinos, this is the first actual sighting of the endangered animal," said Dr M.S Thayaparan, the Program Officer for SOS Rhino Borneo, in a press conference here Wednesday. [italics added]

10 years to find a rhino on the island of Sumatra... and heck, the varmints can't even fly!!!

Several years ago (shortly after the Kulivan sighting) I asked a renowned birder and field guide author at a booksigning what he thought of the chances of Ivory-bills existing. He responded that he didn't think it was possible, and gave the old mantra (or should I say crock-of- ....) that he didn't believe a bird that big could escape detection for so long. At that point I realized that folks who write field guides may know how to paint, or recognize field marks, but they don't necessarily fathom the habits, behavior, or cognition of wild animals. Too often they are relating to creatures as mere 'objects,' not as thinking, reacting, motivated, purposeful, living beings. And so it goes....
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-- New Bird Species --

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Interesting story here about a striking new bird species discovered recently in northeast India. Who'd have thought that after almost 60 YEARS!!!! since the last new species was found in India there could still be more unseen ones to uncover!!!!! Oh myyyy! ; - ) The editor of the journal 'Indian Birds' said "it's nothing short of miraculous" --- when will humans learn they not only don't know everything there is to know about the natural world, they know precious little about it. The more vigilantly one looks, the more 'miracles' one will see.
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-- Attn: Field Tech Wannabes --

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Do you like mucking around in dank water? Think mud is invigorating, and camo is your favorite fashion? Rugged surroundings at little pay doesn't phase you? And your idea of fun includes bugs, cold nights, and days without deodorant, nail polish, or catching "Desperate Housewives" on TV?
--- Have I gotta deal for you!!

Seriously, Cornell is soliciting for Ivory-bill searchers in Arkansas and South Carolina for the coming winter search season; if interested take a gander at their site (application is online); --- and I can still take a few more names to pass along to a different, non-Cornell, group for their forthcoming study in another southern state, as well, if anymore takers. Some local academic and/or FWS folks will be exploring certain areas of other southern states this winter as well. So, if you have the abillity, equipment, desire, and time to look seriously for Ivory-bills this is probably the winter to do it, in terms of opportunities to link up with others.

Some key highlights of the Cornell solicitation (for the AR. locale) are as follows:

These are "volunteer" positions, assisting full-time staff, and a Cornell "Volunteer Agreement Form" must be signed

Arkansas search period January 3 - April 21, 2007

minimum 2-week stints, with 7 possible start dates

strong birding and boating skills required, and ability to work in adverse field conditions (possibly spending 10-12 hrs/day in a canoe or blind with little movement); ability to use or quickly learn necessary digital and computer technology

lodging and major field equipment provided (including canoe, life jackets, GPS, videocam, cell phone); more basic field equipment, food, and travel expenses responsibility of each volunteer

...also helpful if you have a particularly thick skin against critter-bites... and cynics ; - )

see the Cornell site for further details and the Agreement Form.
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-- J. Zickefoose, A Plug & A Pitch --

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A quick plug: If there's a better nature writer in America today than Julie Zickefoose I'm not sure who it is, and she has just produced her first full length book (actually a volume of essays/stories), "Letters From Eden: A Year at Home, In the Woods," due in bookstores in early October (or you can check her website about directly ordering from her).
I've always kinda hoped that Julie would put her word talents (I happen to think she's even a better painter with words than with brushes!) to work writing a full length volume on the Ivory-bill -- she has said that she didn't think she had a book-length manuscript on the topic in her (one of the most wonderful, compelling IBWO essays around is by her, and linked to below), but maybe this first manuscript success will give her the wherewithal to tackle such a project. No doubt Jerry Jackson will continue to put out updated versions of his volume, maybe Tim Gallagher also, or others from Cornell; possibly Phil Hoose or Christopher Cokinos will have future volumes... and the principal investigator of the news to be released in October will have his own volume out, and possibly still others as well. But these will all be mostly academic, historical, reference, even ecological sorts of works, certainly with some adventure and feelings included, but largely cerebral. I envision an effort by Julie though would tap into a whole different realm of our psyche and emotions on this subject, conveying the beauty, the ardor, the hope/despair, the magic, the mystery, and the mysticism associated with the Ivory-bill, as maybe only she can do. Well there's my pitch... do with it what you will, Julie, I know your plate is pretty full!!

http://www.juliezickefoose.com/writing/ibw.php
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-- Wherefore Art Thou, Ivory-bill --

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Previously, I've repeatedly made the argument that EVEN IF I believed the Ivory-bill was extinct I would STILL operate on the assumption that it survives --- because the potentiial consequences of assuming it extinct only to find out later one is wrong, are far worse than the consequences of assuming it is alive, only to find out later it has been gone for decades. It is the same reason our legal system assumes people are innocent until proven guilty, lest innocents suffer undeserved punishment. Some biologists call this "the Romeo error" (after Shakespeare's Romeo poisoning himself upon believing, incorrectly, that Juliet has died), and it ought to be avoided whenever possible; this is why anyone serious about bird life should be encouraging (not discouraging or derisive of) IBWO searchers in their efforts. Indeed, why anyone serious about birds would do otherwise is beyond me... other than possibly trying to prop up the slender skeptical scaffold upon which they have sequestered themselves.

BTW, Jim Fitzpatrick (John's brother) spoke at the New Jersey Meadowlands yesterday on "the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" --- if anyone heard the talk I'd be interested to know if he happened to indicate when Cornell's final summary report for last season would be out, or had anything new to say.
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