-- Ark. Followup --

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A poster over at IBWO Researchers Forum notes an Arkansas Democrat Gazette article (requires subscription) which cites an Ivory-billed sighting by David Carruth of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation from about a month ago (if I understand the timing correctly), as well as 23 "encounters" from Oct. 2007 to Feb. 2008 in the Big Woods search area.
This was all part of the evidence presented in the case against the previously-referred-to irrigation project proposal. Until Cornell fleshes it out with more details, difficult to tell if this is simply information as part of a complete legal brief, or substantive claims that will be given significant weight in their final summary report. Apparently, no pics accompanying that legal brief :-(

On a sidenote, I'm hoping to have Bob Russell write up an updated list of the most promising Ivory-bill search locales for use on my blog since his previous 'Top 10' list is no longer available at the 'BirdingAmerica' website that Mary Scott has taken down. Maybe available later this month.
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-- Arkansas Season --

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Today on the state birding listserv, Alan Mueller of the Cornell team responded to an inquiry about this season's Arkansas' searches as follows:

"The IBWO searches this year were hampered by the high water, but they did go
on. We had to skip some areas we wanted to search because 1. it was not
possible to get to sites early in the morning or to stay late in the evening
because of increased travel time caused by high water, or 2. the high water
made trips too dangerous. We searched spots we could get to, not the best,
but the best that could be done under the circumstances."

Maybe by month's end we'll get some sort of preliminary summary of sightings and signs from this season that were considered significant.
Meanwhile a $420 million Arkansas irrigation project remains on hold while Ivory-bill matters continue to be sorted out.
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-- Weekend Follies --

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Little IBWO news so just some miscellany for the weekend:

Something for all you Puffin lovers (i.e., EVERYone) here.

Article on potential effect of lead shot on humans here.

Webcam of Peregrine Falcon nest with chicks at University of Pittsburg here.

...and don't forget the rapidly-growing California Great Horned Owls here.

Martin Collinson, on his blog, first made me aware of this list for (in)sanity-maintenance that's apparently been humming around the internet for awhile in slight variations.

Oh yeah, and lastly this bumper sticker seen recently on a car in front of me:

"I called Bush a moron, before it became cool to call Bush a moron"
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-- April Ends --

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Artist, writer, speaker, Indy film aficionado, and sometime birder, David Sibley, was recently spotted at a film festival showing of Alex Karpovsky's docu-drama about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, perhaps satiating his discreet infatuation with the elusive nemesis species ;-))) :

http://www.picusblog.com/2008/04/woodpecker-movie.html

The film's next showing, BTW, will be this coming weekend, May 4, during the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore, for any others similarly obsessed...

Meanwhile, Cornell's Mobile Team has updated their travel log. Annoyingly, they continue to chatter much about non-IBWO related matters, while revealing little as to their judgment of various habitat and locales. I assume places visited are being scored or ranked in some manner as to their suitability for Ivory-bills and the advisability of more intensive future searches, but from the log posts one can hardly tell if this is the case... or is it possible they are not finding any areas worthy of further time and effort??? A lot remains to be sorted out for next year's scaled-back efforts.
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-- Tanner On the Imperial --

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Found this 1964 paper by James Tanner on his 1962 search for the Imperial Woodpecker in Mexico an interesting read:

http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v081n01/p0074-p0081.pdf

or same piece here in html format: http://tinyurl.com/3qa8xy

Especially interesting that he concludes that hunting, and not habitat loss, is the principal reason for decline of this particular species.

... on a sidenote, a poster at IBWO Researchers Forum notes that the automatic ACONE cameras at Bayou de View (ARK.) have been removed due to incredibly high water levels there. I would think this would mean that many, maybe even all, the Reconyx cameras in the area also had to be removed by now. After a prolonged period of drought throughout much of the southeast many IBWO search areas have been heavily flooded over off-and-on this season.
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-- Of Some Note --

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I've always been pleasantly surprised by the fascination people have with Albert Einstein, not just his science (which most of us can't deeply-understand), but the rest of his life as well --- indeed Time Magazine named him, among quite a panoply, as 'Man of the Century,' and repeated biographies of him become best-sellers.

In American birding we have our own 'Einstein' of sorts: This is the 100th anniversary year of Roger Tory Peterson's birth. I dare say no matter which side of the Ivory-bill debate a person stands Roger, with his many talents, is likely one of one's heroes. Last year, "Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography," by Douglas Carlson, came out to very favorable reviews. During a stop at the bookstore this weekend I was 'pleasantly surprised' again to already find another new biography of the man who started it all for so many of us: "Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson," by Elizabeth Rosenthal. May the treatises on his wonderful life and accomplishments, which made being an oddball kid with a fancy for birds, not so oddball for later generations, keep coming. Attention that is well-deserved, and might one day rival John James Audubon for whom there also exist a surprisingly long list of popular bios.

[ Roger Tory Peterson Institute here: http://www.rtpi.org/?page_id=20 ]

"Reluctant at first to accept the straightjacket of a world I did not comprehend, I finally, with the help of my hobby, made some sort of peace with society." -- Roger Tory Peterson

Over a year ago on this blog I suggested a bumper sticker that I thought had some merit: "WWRTPD" (What would Roger Tory Peterson do?) Yeah, its audience would be limited to be sure, but I'll offer it up again, free for the taking, should anyone wish to run with it in this year of honor for a man who instructed and inspired us all (...and BTW, who, unlike most others, kept the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in his field guides to his very end ;-)))
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-- Sunday Meditation --

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Just some passages from astronomer Chet Raymo today taken from his 2003 book, "The Path: a One-Mile Walk Through the Universe" :

"...however one chooses to romanticize what in retrospect seems a fetching life, it is impossible to reclaim it... Technology -- with its awesome potential and perils -- is here to stay.
The inventory of Earth's living species currently stands somewhere near 2 million. There are almost certainly at least ten times as many species that have not yet been described and named --- the true number of species may be more than 100 million. Many of these are inevitably doomed by human population growth....

All life --- the whole glorious parade along the path --- depends upon the photosynthesizers... With the invention of photosynthesis, life plugged into a star, and the battle against entropy was won. The universe continues to run down, as it must, but on the surface of the earth there spreads out a film of highly ordered matter of marvelous complexity and resourcefulness. The one-celled organisms that ruled the Earth 3 billion years ago were no more advanced than the scum that lives on our shower curtains, but that scum had evolved the ability to make carbohydrates with sunlight... Animals developed along a different branch of the evolutionary tree, and it seems unlikely that you and I had photosynthesizers among our ancestors. But the tree of life is a web of interdependence. Green leaves are our necessary link to our yellow star.

...The Arcadian ideal of humans living in harmony with tamed nature did not begin with Frederick Law Olmsted, Capability Brown, or even the supposed Peloponnesian paradise itself (witness the more ancient myth of the Garden of Eden), nor was it discredited by the obscenities of the twentieth century's wars, the Great Depression, or the grimmer excesses of technology. It is a sturdy old myth, and in it we might still hope to combine the Enlightenment, with its confidence in the power of the human mind to make sense of the world, and romanticism, with its belief that all of life is a miracle. Along the one-mile walk of the path, I have found these ostensibly competing tendencies happily fused: order and surprise, artificial and natural, civilized and wild, human self-interest and organic wholeness.
....About half of the earth's land surface is presently exploited by humans, and all of the land and water surface is touched in some way by the waste products of human cunning...
The technological products of human ingenuity represent an inevitable stage in planetary evolution, yet our Arcadian yearnings are dictated by millions of years of pretechnological human evolution. It is a conundrum of human life that our intellects have outraced our instincts; cultural evolution has overtaken organic evolution. Biologically, we are hunter-gatherers who suddenly find ourselves in command of almost unimaginable powers for planetary transformation."

....and lastly this thought from E.O. Wilson:

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. "

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-- YouTube Piece --

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Just an old YouTube offering to tide things over during the current IBWO news lull:




Meanwhile, independent searcher Richard Lyttle is asking for additional help from any volunteers for his efforts along the Santee area in S. Carolina. His website here: http://www.ibwsearches.com/
The official IBWO search in the Congaree is probably winding down about now for this season; don't know if any veterans of that effort care to assist Richard.
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-- Quick Correction --

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Just a quick correction to post of couple days ago: a reader informs me the Cornell Mobile Team is still in Fla., currently North Florida, before their return to Ark.
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-- Killing Time --

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For what it's worth....

Some pics of Louisiana's Atchafalaya region here:

http://www.cclockwood.com/stockimages/swamp_hardwoodbottomland.htm

...and another story of potential problems with an endangered species plan here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24256895/

Again, this gets at the problem I was trying to expose in the "Parable" post, that many such plans are potentially flawed; their short-term success questionable, and their long term success usually doomed (given a long enough term). I certainly don't oppose such efforts, but the chances of full success are more limited than often implied. Moreover, there are sometimes pork-barrel-like politics involved when individuals vigorously want certain pet projects, that are NOT guaranteed of success, funded at the expense of other projects also not guaranteed of success. The way to save species is to save habitat, and unlike many other endangered species, the IBWO search focuses attention on 100s of 1000s of acres of habitat across a wide expanse of land --- yes, it could all come to naught, but the evidence and verdict is far from in, despite what some choose to contend.
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-- Mobile Team --

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Cornell's Mobile Team's latest update is now up covering their travels in the Mangrove forests, Everglades, and Fakahatchee Strand of South Florida, with no breaking IBWO news. Update only goes through March 26th, almost 4 weeks ago. I suspect by now they're well on their way back to Arkansas or even there already.
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-- ??????? --

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In possibly more discouraging news, just noticed this brief note from LSU's James Van Remsen on the Louisiana birding listserv today in regard to the La. IBWO search:

"LA DWF sponsored a 4-person, 30-day search of the best habitats in Pearl River WMA in Jan/Feb, and they did not detect any evidence for presence of IBWO."

Can I assume this is in fact a reference to THIS year (if so, did they have any contact with Mike Collins)??? I had not heard of the LSU folks spending any significant time in the Pearl of late (...if anything, one might expect them to be spending time in the Atchafalaya this season?). (Their 2002 effort was a similar 6-person, 30-day Jan/Feb search of the Pearl.)

In other news, in early March I briefly mentioned here the surprise finding (by remote camera) in California of a wolverine long thought to be extirpated from the area. Here an interesting follow-up report to that story demonstrating that controversy isn't unique to the Ivory-bill situation.
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-- A Parable --

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An old parable tells of a young boy who spies an old man early one morning walking along the shoreline, picking up starfish in the sand and tossing them into the sea. The boy runs up and asks, "What are you doing old man?" To which the man explains, "These starfish were stranded in the sand overnight by the tide, and if they don't get back in the water before the sun rises they will bake and die here." The boy looks far down the shoreline and says, "but old man there are thousands of starfish along this beach, what possible difference do you think your efforts can make?" The old man picks up another, tossing it into the waves, and responds, "it made a difference to THAT one."

Our efforts in conservation are frankly miniscule, and almost meaningless, in the grand scheme of things, yet it is still imperative we make such efforts on behalf of whatever remnant of moral authority we have as humans.
I'd almost rather not write this post but increasingly feel pushed to, since skeptics now give so much weight to the notion that dollars spent on the IBWO is wasted while other endangered species go begging. OPEN YOUR EYES! --- MOST current endangered species, as well as most wild vertebrate life, on this continent WILL be largely GONE within a few hundred years no matter how short-term money is spent; THAT is the unstoppable trajectory that human development is on; if someone can paint me a realistic scenario in which that is NOT the case I'd be curious to see it.

People are looking 25-50 years into the future and believing that blip of time means something. It doesn't. You can kiss the condors and whooping cranes and spotted owls and most wood warblers, etc. etc. etc. goodbye. Such is the dirty little secret of human "progress." Still, morally, those of us who care about such things have no choice but to make the effort to save them anyway, for however briefly we can. It is really no different than spending enormous sums of money on medical procedures for individuals with cancer, or heart disease, or stroke, or Alzheimers, etc. to extend their lives for 5 or 10 or even 25 years --- even though they/we are all going to die in the end. If we make such efforts for individuals we should certainly do so for whole species, even if doomed. We can save some of these species long enough that our grandchildren, maybe even our great grandchildren, can see them, but if you think your great grandchildren's great grandchildren will see them you are dreaming, with little sense of the speed of oncoming changes. Apologies for my pessimism....

Working to save the Ivory-bill, even if it turned out to be gone, just might entail preserving more land and habitat than work on behalf of almost any other species now under consideration. I'm not convinced the $27 million is a wise use of dollars... problem is, I'm not convinced it isn't, and I still find the naysayers' arguments just a tad too simplistic and pollyannish about how much good it would automatically do elsewhere. Like so much in this debate, that is one great big unsettled... MAYBE.
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-- Don't Ask, Don't Tell?--

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Emailers keep asking about various things/rumors... if I knew of anything impending I couldn't report it anyway, so not a lot of point in asking! But, I don't. Ground searches will be largely wound down by end of month, though various cameras/ARUs will remain up and monitored. Still awaiting a final report from Cornell's Mobile Team as to any thoughts from time spent in Florida. Don't know for sure, but I don't expect any significant results from the Auburn group in the Panhandle, nor from the Arkansas effort, nor from Texas. Tennessee of course indicated a few glimmers lately, but likely nothing conclusive. Similarly for South Carolina, and not certain they will even publicly release their findings. Don't know about Louisiana, but doubt there will be anything significant to report out of Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. All just hunches, and not much point to emailing me for further info/answers that I don't have (though there are a few details I'm waiting to hear more about). Officials will report things on their own timetable as appropriate. Of course there are also some independent searchers out there who don't answer to the IBWO Working Group and can report more freely. And no, I don't know anything further about Bill Smith's supposed book either. Let's see, does that about cover it. Hope I'm wrong, and there's more to certain rumors than I've gotten wind of, but not holdin' my breath. Better to maintain low expectations and maybe be surprised, than the other way around.

Otherwise, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker just keeps getting around, showing up yesterday in the "The Huffington Post" of all places. Just a brief mention many paragraphs down in a rant from Harry Fuller, but since he seems to have gotten most of it right in his essay, perhaps he's right about our friend the IBWO.
.......................................................

Elsewhere:

This from "Icanhascheezburger" blog:




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-- Weekend --

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Not much news, so will just head into the weekend with this quote drawn from Morris Kline's classic, "Mathematics: the Loss of Certainty" (it is in reference to the 20th century crumbling of the foundations of mathematics):

"The developments in this century bearing on the foundations of mathematics are best summarized in a story. On the banks of the Rhine, a beautiful castle had been standing for centuries. In the cellar of the castle, an intricate network of webbing had been constructed by industrious spiders, who lived there. One day a strong wind sprang up and destroyed the web. Frantically, the spiders worked to repair the damage. They thought it was their webbing that was holding up the castle."

I think "the foundations of mathematics" could be substituted with "the existence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker," and the only question remaining then is whether the spiders represent skeptics or believers...
As an emailer recently wrote, we're heading into the bottom of the ninth (for this season), and I wish I had more to say but that's all for now.
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-- Stalking The Ghost Bird --

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Only recently acquired Professor Michael Steinberg's new volume, "Stalking the Ghost Bird," about the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Louisiana (buy here or here). Not finished with it, but will say a few things, since some emailers have asked about it:

The book is highly anecdotal, which both makes it interesting, but also easily dismissable by critics. But within those anecdotes it gives a little more of the flavor of the many Ivory-bill sightings which have occurred throughout the southeast over the years (even though it largely focuses on La.), but aren't always widely publicized. Indeed, several names, both professionals and average Joes, that are prominent in this book, aren't seen much or at all in some other Ivory-bill volumes (BTW, Mike Collins' work at the Pearl is not included in the book, for anyone wondering -- much of the book was probably written prior to Mike's efforts). The author and most of those he interviews clearly believe in the species' likely persistence. A nice, brief summary of major sighting claims across the south over the decades is given at book's end.

At a pricey $25 (or $17 Amazon) for a ~150 page book that focuses primarily on a single state it's hard for me to wholeheartedly recommend it to all (academic press publications tend to be pricey, and not sure why this couldn't have come out directly in paperback, and cheaper), but it does fill a different niche from other IBWO books and is an enjoyable read and relatively current... so hardcore 'true believers' may well want it (IBWO skeptics will view it as more-of-the-same)... or, if the species is finally confirmed in Louisiana ahead of all other states, then... yeah, it may get snapped off the shelves.
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-- Other Stuff --

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Nice essay on extinction by Jonathan Rosen here (though no mention made of the Ivory-bill).

And other vitally important news of the woodpecker-variety here.
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-- More From Cornell --

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When Cornell's Arkansas Team never mentioned the results of their Big Woods' helicopter search in their Feb. updates, one could surmise it meant there wasn't much news to report. So not surprising that in a new Cornell summary of that endeavor, it is concluded that Ivory-bills and many other birds simply do not adequately flush for view at the sound of such overhead flights. Their summary here.

The principal piece of evidence they have is the small number (percentage-wise) of Pileateds which flushed out into the open (they have a sense of the overall numbers of Pileateds present from their extensive groundwork, and of course any IBWOs would be hugely fewer).
This reminds me that I've long wondered how many Pileateds are being captured on film by remote cameras in the Big Woods. Critics find it hard-to-imagine that, if they exist, Ivory-bills haven't yet been captured by remote cameras. Knowing the number and frequency of capturing PIWOs on film might give a slightly better indication of the likelihood that an IBWO ought to have been filmed by now. Anyone out there have such stats (both total no. of PIWOs captured, and as a percentage of all 'critters' captured on film --- one practical problem is that many shots of PIWO will be the same bird returning again and again to the same cavity or foraging site)???

...............................................................

And another aside:

Two men are staring at a lone sentence on a blackboard. It reads simply:

"Only an idiot would believe this sentence."

The first man asks the second, "Do you believe that sentence?"

The second man replies, "OF COURSE NOT! Only an idiot would believe that sentence."

Think about it....
(I've adapted this from one of my favorite, more unusual, internet sites: http://www.futilitycloset.com/ )
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