Sunday, January 07, 2024

-- Intermission ("They are other nations...") --

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A while back I remarked to someone that “the natives are restless” in reference to a lot of splintering/infighting within the so-called IBWO ‘believer’ community — different believers, believing different things about different bits of evidence (always the case to some degree, but with perhaps wider/deeper fissures now). 

Even IF the Ivorybill is finally documented by someone I wonder how long the kumbaya moment will last before recriminations surface. To the victor go the spoils (the fame, the glory, perhaps $$$)… the also-rans will want to claim, ‘see, I told you they existed; I told you I’d observed them’ — yet their claims will stiiiiiiiill need to be separately documented to hold water — the hint of possibility may be stronger, but no true validation for them. Documenting the IBWO in any one locale will/would be a momentous, joyous, celebratory event… but also clearly the beginning of a LOT more work and effort and questions ahead!

Anyway, for now, maybe just a brief meditative intermission through some of the Arkansas Big Woods:


And lastly, as a Sunday sermon, I’ll re-employ this famous quote from writer/naturalist Henry Beston which I've used before:


We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

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Wednesday, January 03, 2024

— Silence Is Not Golden —

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1)   Will try not to belabor this too much, but very disappointed that USFWS reached the end of the year without any public pronouncement (as I thought required by regulation?) on IBWO status. While most take their non-action as a declaration that the Ivorybill ought not yet be declared extinct, having opened this quandary, they really need to make a public statement to that effect with at least a couple of sentences of how/why they reached that conclusion, and when they might revisit the question again. There are plenty of diligent, dedicated. knowledgeable folks working at USFWS; not clear to me if any of them are assigned to the Ivorybill issue. Oy. :((

In any event, thanks to all who took the time/effort to respond to the Agency in helping them reach their, ummm, er, non-opinion. Special credit to Matt Courtman for marshaling so much support for the IBWO at a time when skeptics no doubt thought they had a done-deal (to declare the species extinct). 


2)  I’ve been following (and enjoying) Andrew Gelman’s blog for many years. He’s an award-winning PhD. professor of statistics, but who writes largely at a layreader’s level (on the blog). With my recent theme of ‘critical thinking’ I’ll just pass along his latest bit on science reporting, ‘Clarke’s Law’, and academic science:


https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/01/02/clarkes-law-and-whos-to-blame-for-bad-science-reporting/


(...I realize skeptics may read this as a potential slam against much reporting on the IBWO, but actually I believe it cuts several ways.)


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Thursday, December 28, 2023

— Two Challenges — +Addenda

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Here's your mission if you choose to accept it ;) ....

Am seeing a lot of end-of-year news reports saying that 2024 will be the year of AI-generated fake videos (…especially affecting the political sphere). We’ve had skilled still-photographic fakery possible for some years, and now the rapid rise of fake video and audio.

I suspect amongst readers here there are some pretty savvy techies, and I’d love to challenge such folks to produce a snippet of fake Ivory-bills going up/down or around a tree trunk, or alternatively in flight right in front of you. Not something so jerky or sloppy as to be obviously digitized, but an example that might at first glance actually look intriguing to Average-Joe-Birder! Something that can stand as a sort of warning or precautionary sample of the capabilities we need be on guard against going forward. Don’t spend toooo much time on this (you’re not getting paid; just a recognition of your talents). Any takers???

I'm doubtful we’re at the stage where such a video (AND storyline) can be produced that could withstand scrutiny and be very persuasive…. but hey, prove me wrong!

[send to me at: cyberthrush@gmail.com]


OK, 2nd unrelated challenge: to read and digest the following passages (from a day ago on Facebook) ;)


This is really only for the deeply-entrenched… a comment from Fred Virrazzi and 4 followup comments from Chuck Hunter (but by time you read this, there could be more back-and-forth added to it?). Topics around IBWO longevity, double-knocks, behavior, and general evidence for recent IBWO persistence… (a number of important, but also often disputed, points brought up):


https://www.facebook.com/groups/ivorybillnews/posts/1718185388701324/?comment_id=1721945004992029


https://www.facebook.com/groups/ivorybillnews/posts/1718185388701324/?comment_id=1721945004992029&reply_comment_id=1722548174931712


https://www.facebook.com/groups/ivorybillnews/posts/1718185388701324/?comment_id=1721945004992029&reply_comment_id=1722548511598345


https://www.facebook.com/groups/ivorybillnews/posts/1718185388701324/?comment_id=1721945004992029&reply_comment_id=1722550864931443


https://www.facebook.com/groups/ivorybillnews/posts/1718185388701324/?comment_id=1721945004992029&reply_comment_id=1722551348264728


Anyway, apologies for so much posting at end-of-year when I was expecting quiet-time, other than possibly, perhaps, maybe, perchance, ???, USFWS having something official to say....


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ADDENDUM  12/29:   Now Chuck has added a posting on a different FB group that summarizes much of what he writes above while filling in even more info/details (surely, I think, the longest post he’s ever done on FB). I either agree with, or am neutral on (i.e., less certain about), everything he writes here.


https://www.facebook.com/groups/179784035376368/permalink/7297009460320421/?mibextid=c7yyfP


As an aside, just want to state that I have never met, talked with, nor have any other connection to Mr. Hunter (or anyone else at USFWS for that matter), lest any reader thinks I play favorites in citing him so often. In an arena where almost everyone participating, knowingly or unknowingly, is strongly swayed by their own preconceived biases and/or wishful thinking, have just always found him to be as close to a pillar of objective judgment/knowledge as we have!


ADDENDUM 2:  In a bit of coincidence, I just discovered that Slate ran this article on photoshopped birds on same day as I posted my video challenge above:

https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/ai-generated-birds-santa-cardinal.html


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Monday, December 25, 2023

-- Revisiting the H. Hunter Paper --

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I had hoped to write a followup to my prior mention of the lengthy Hannah Hunter dissertation on acoustic evidence, but it would just take too much time to do properly. So, instead, for those who may have found the piece too long to read through, I’ll just leave here a few key verbatim passages from the paper (a small sampling of all Hannah has written), which hit upon some of the issues as to why I can't take most auditory evidence too seriously [I have bolded several lines for emphasis]:


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“After the 2005–06 field seasons, however, digital playback was de-emphasized as a search method in Cornell’s searches. It had a relatively small ‘carrying distance’ (Rohrbaugh et al., 2007, p. 36), so was not particularly helpful in sampling large, dense areas…. A more geographically appropriate ivorybill communication tool was found in mechanical double-knock mimicry. This method can be traced back to Tanner, who wrote that ‘pound[ing] loudly on a wooden stub’ to imitate a double-knock would ‘sometimes make the bird answer by calling or rapping itself’ (Tanner, 1942, p. 42). Additionally, double-knock simulation has been successful in communicating with other Campephilus woodpeckers in South America.


Sonic communication methods, however, are not embraced by everyone. Hill, for instance, wrote these instructions to future ivorybill seekers:

[I]mitations of ivory-bill calls and knocks should absolutely never be used in the Choctawhatchee River basin. … There is no evidence that such sounds have any positive effect on your chances of seeing an ivorybill but such sounds will corrupt our monitoring efforts and will mislead other birders into thinking they have detected an ivorybill. … I think we can all agree that when we hear a kent call or a double knock in the forests … we want to be confident that it is an ivorybill and not a human imitating an ivorybill.”


“This passage encompasses several common criticisms of sound-making methods. Firstly, that they have not been proven to ‘work’. Contrary to the idea that ivorybills would be lured in or would respond to sonic mimicry, some believe that ivorybills are territorial birds that could be scared away from an area if they hear the apparent calls of other ivorybills. Some have even speculated that Cornell’s use of active sonic methods in the 2000s drove away what may have been an active ivorybill population from the search areas (M. A. Michaels, personal communication). Many of these concerns stem from insecurity about how little is known about ivorybill communication and behavior, and fear that what is true for other Campephilus species in South America might not be true for ivorybills—and, indeed, that what worked with the ivorybills Tanner encountered in the 1930s might not garner the same response in ivorybills today. 7 Courtman, for instance, has recently stopped using active sonic methods altogether, since he is ‘just not sure of what we’re communicating’ (M. Courtman, personal communication).

The other concern Hill highlights is that sound-making methods might ‘corrupt’ by misleading other searchers.”


Despite these processes, Charif stressed that even the strongest recordings from White River weren’t ‘proof of anything’, but instead ‘very intriguing evidence (R. Charif, personal communication). One issue for the persuasiveness of these putative ivorybill recordings is that there is such limited information about ivorybill sounds. There is only one undisputed sound recording series to compare against: one that is rather short, controversial, and difficult to replicate. As Michaels told me, ‘the [1935] recordings from the Singer Tract are like a Hollywood movie … so everybody, the public expectation, and even the scientific expectation, is for something that’s impossible to obtain in the real world’ (M. A. Michaels, personal communication). The parabolic reflector used by the 1935 recordists (Figure 2) is ‘like an incredible zoom lens .… That recording was made at a nest tree so they were very close, [and] they had a super high gain microphone. … the recordings that you pick up from distant birds [with ARUs] are nothing like that’ (R. Charif, personal communication). This is largely an issue of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR): the relative strength of the desired signal (here, the ivorybill sounds) against background noise. ARUs, however, by design pick up sounds indiscriminately: they capture soundscapes with lots of information (other species, weather, human presence, etc.), which may or may not contain ivorybills far away or in passing. Any surviving ivorybills included in these sonic captures, then, would likely sound and look (on a spectrogram) quite different than the 1935 recordings (A. Warde, personal communication).”


“Many involved in recent searches initially thought kent calls to be distinctive enough that sound-alikes wouldn’t be an issue: ‘if you were to say to anybody who knows North American birds … who has listened to the [1935] Allen-Kellogg recordings, like “suppose I tell you that you could confuse a Great Blue Heron for an Ivory-billed Woodpecker”, they would think you were absolutely out of your mind’ (R. Charif, personal communication). Part of the problem, Charif says, is that ‘when you have tens of thousands of hours of recordings, you also get recordings of very unusual anomalous sounds, which are not the typical sounds of that species’. Additionally, though ivorybill sounds are somewhat distinctive, the acoustic structure of kent calls and especially double-knocks are relatively simple, and thus vulnerable to spectrogram look-alikes (M. Lammertink, personal communication). When combined with the SNR issue, false detection of ivorybill sounds was a real concern, and sound-alikes continue to be a common retort against acoustic evidence.”


The authors argued that Gadwall ducks had been recorded in other contexts to make such sounds, and that their vocalizations were audible in some of Cornell’s putative ivorybill recordings (Jones et al., 2007). For all these reasons, a close quantitative match between an ARU recording and the template sounds would not necessarily mean the recording was an ivorybill. Indeed, the process of translating sounds into recordings, and then into spectrograms, is not totally immutable—not only because background and contextual sounds around specific events might be lost, but also because field recording conditions and spectrogram processing choices affect the final appearance of the image. In other words, this is translation with corruption, in subtle but significant ways.”


“This is not to say that sound can never offer consequential evidence in science,9 but rather that, in this case, the physical and conceptual geographies of ivorybill searching limit sound’s persuasiveness. In addition to the issues outlined above, there are the limits to the contemporary acoustic evidence itself: Many of the ARU recordings not only have weak SNR but are also rare and generally brief. Both Mennill and Lammertink, who have studied other Campephilus species in Central and South America, pointed out that the ivorybill-like captures of the Cornell and Auburn-Windsor searches were atypical of these kinds of birds: ‘whatever is producing those sounds that we’ve got on the Choctawhatchee is not producing the double-knock and the kent sounds very often … if this is an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, why isn’t it double-knocking 100 times in a morning? Why are we getting 5 or 10 double-knocks in a day and not many, many more than that?’ (D. Mennill, personal communication). Although there are several contemporary recordings that these scientists still find intriguing, all the issues discussed in this section make it unlikely that the conservation community will be convinced of ivorybill survival from sound recordings alone, or even in context with other forms of evidence. This is especially true given widespread ornithological skepticism about ivorybills: In such a beyond-belief, high-stakes case, there is little room for ambiguity. The capture, translation, and analysis of field sound recordings are thus of most use when circulated back to the field to inform searchers’ navigation. That is to say, in their role of expanding and quantifying the listening geographies of search sites towards the goal of an irrefutable video or photograph of an ivory-billed woodpecker.”


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Again, Hannah's full paper is HERE.


....I suspect I may have one more post before year's end, but in case not, a safe, healthy New Year ahead to all!

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Thursday, December 21, 2023

— My Biggest Big Woods Disappointment —

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I can accept the possibility that human beings are such bumbling clods that they can’t in 80 years go into deep woods and get a single clearcut photo or video of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker… maybe. But cameras aren’t human, just mere mechanical tools that don’t tire, get distracted, hungry or fatigued, aren’t scared of crocs or snakes or spiders, etc. They do have mechanical problems/failures but otherwise just sit there doing their job, hour-after-hour, day-after-day without complaint. So (reiterating what I’ve written before) the hardest bit to explain in this long endeavor is why no remote, automatic camera, trained on an interesting cavity, tree, foraging spot, has EVER captured a clearcut Ivorybill? All the talk of Ivorybills being wary and strong flyers and having long fleeing distances etc.etc. is fine for explaining why they elude paltry humans, but not necessarily to explain how they avoid automatic cameras (though some postulate the cameras themselves simply scare the birds away).


My greatest hope (and in the end disappointment) in this area came when Cornell deployed the ACONE camera system in the Arkansas Big Woods (a new system of computerized cameras that automatically scanned a broad flyway, and ID’d birds passing through it that fit characteristics of an IBWO). Everyday presumably IBWOs not only forage and enter/leave cavities, but also FLY from point A to point B… if that includes traveling through a wide open area then by gosh what a far greater opportunity to catch one on film. And yet, zippo!! No solid hits with ACONE (perhaps THIS was their most interesting image). The system had a lot of practical problems (it may have even been functionally down more time than it was running), but it still seemed like a great idea even if used erratically -- again, ONE clear picture is all we want for starters (…unless IBWOs had already departed from the area, or even died, by the time ACONE was employed, or alternately, simply never used that flight path?)


Since the Big Woods search ended, improvements have been made in ACONE-type hardware/software, but they aren’t cheap, and I’m not aware of such a system being used to look for IBWOs anywhere else (if someone knows differently please do tell, and this type system has been used for other things).


For explanation of such failures, the main argument that we believers really have left to hang our hat on is (as many have stated) the sheer scarcity of this species combined with the size and remoteness of habitat it favors. As they say, we are not just looking for a needle in a haystack, but for a moving needle (that may be actively trying to avoid us) in a hard-to-penetrate haystack... stiiiiiiiill, are we putting cameras in all the wrong places for them to fail so consistently... with the exception of those instances where the problem is resolution and interpretation. All of which raises in turn the issue of how (mathematically) did such an exceedingly rare critter ever get through a possible ‘bottleneck’ of the 1940s to still even be around today. We walk a tight thread: there must be enough IBWOs to reproduce and hang on for 80 years, but not enough to be photographed well in that entire time period.  Again, explanations are possible, but it does seem as if they require the sun and moon to line up just so, in some precise chancy way, to account for all the nuances…. then again, on occasion, the sun and moon DO line up to produce a solar eclipse, one of the most incredible, awe-inspiring sights in all of nature. So, there’s that ;))


These days technology keeps rapidly advancing…. there’s use of eDNA in the field, advanced drone capabilities, better, smaller cameras, but I'd still love to see a working ACONE-type system brought back into use somewhere (by now it might even be less cost-prohibitive than previously); at least the theory behind it seemed very promising.


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And to end with some miscellany, 2 bits referenced on Facebook:


1)  A map/story of the “world’s 36th Biodiversity Hotspot… the North American Coastal Plain” which eerily coincides closely with the former range of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:

https://www.cepf.net/stories/announcing-worlds-36th-biodiversity-hotspot-north-american-coastal-plain?fbclid=IwAR28LgK4mQoBn1MH65axl37KKOS9qmZMg8hZ9rsOUMTGcbQdmUS3iCpmtDY


2)  And lastly there are tons of Ivorybill artwork out there which I don't usually call attention to, but, to end on a bright note, I was gobsmacked by these two recent examples over on FB:


a) a lifesize taxidermy-constructed female Ivorybill (posed on a tree here) from artist Wilhelm Goebel. Stunning!!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/179784035376368/permalink/7264176590270375/?mibextid=c7yyfP


b)  and, sort of at the other end of the spectrum, this miniature carving from Keith Mueller:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/179784035376368/permalink/7269904446364256/?mibextid=c7yyfP


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Tuesday, December 19, 2023

— Bad Overwhelming Good —

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         “Always remain open minded…. just not so open-minded that your brain falls out.

              — old maxim attributed to various writers



Hopefully, last post on this theme and then on to other things… I may briefly talk of the ACONE system (used in the Big Woods) in next post… IF anyone out there was involved with it, I’d love to know if anything like it has been deployed anywhere since (for IBWO searching) or has it been mothballed???….


Way back when this saga began I thought that all claims, stories, sightings, etc. should be put out on the internet for the hivemind of the Web to see and judge… the cream would rise to the top. It was an attitude many bloggers held back then — the whole point of the internet being to let everyone have their say from which truth would emerge. Hahhh (look at the internet today)! Early on, as many remember, the IBWO debate quickly devolved into vitriol on birding sites, trolls and misfits often holding sway...


Back in those days a lot of active IBWO information was being held close-to-the-vest (by USFWS, Cornell, others). I wasn’t fond of that at the time, but appreciate it more in retrospect, because frankly no doubt much of it was junk information. The “hivemind” of the Web isn't always a smooth-running lean machine, nor a pleasant place. The fact is that MOST IBWO claims are mistakes (largely well-intentioned, but not always). If all claims being made had been published (with no rapid followups confirming them), it would’ve simply made IBWO searchers look foolish (…well, MORE foolish than many already perceived them).  Several early optimists for the Ivorybill no doubt turned skeptical because of the sheer volume of claims they received that could never be confirmed, and in many cases made little sense (it was right outside my kitchen window, or on my suet feeder, or downtown on a telephone pole, or in my Wisconsin backyard etc.).  It’s the ‘boy who cried wolf’ syndrome… cry wolf enough times with no wolf appearing, and pretty soon it’s hard to take the cries seriously. I'm not sure more recent entrants to Ivorybill discussion always grasp that sheer volume of false prior claims.


And that is now my concern about the spread of weak IBWO reports in social media — whether they are from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or 2 weeks ago — while many may find them interesting, they likely do more harm than good; producing more skeptics than believers, at least among serious birders and scientists. Perceptions are important and I always try to understand/anticipate the perceptions of skeptics, not just the perception of believers inside their own bubble. If 90 or 95% of claims are false, it’s easy to generalize to 100% -- it may be a fallacy, but it's a natural one. 

Of 1000s of enthusiasts frequenting IBWO discussions on social media, only a small percentage seem to be knowledgeable birders or scientists.  Reports that come in rarely have the detail or content that an experienced birder would know to include — the average John Doe has no clue how to write up a decent birding or scientific report of an unusual or rare species. When unknown people send me sketchy reports of birds they just KNOW are Ivorybills I write back with a list of fairly basic questions for more info, and 90% of the time I never hear back from them. The few who respond, get a second smaller set of questions, at which point almost no one replies further. Not encouraging! Folks, if you’re going to report an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, you are going to be grilled. As Harry would’ve said, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.’


In short, all I’m saying is that the ongoing plethora of reports, including loads of Pileated (and Red-headed) Woodpeckers ID’d as Ivorybills that have sprung forth in the last decade (including being proudly sent to USFWS), have NOT helped the “believer” cause — it’s not a good look for us! Instead they reinforce and strengthen the skeptical case of how easily and frequently people make mistakes. The current joke is that a photo can only be an IBWO if it is blurry or less than 6 pixels. Of course, here and there, are instances of really intriguing, promising bits of evidence (I think); my fear is of those getting drowned out by all the extraneous chaff that can be distracting. There’s no way to stop bogus reports from showing up, and it’s even possible a weak claim one day turns out to be true, or a series of weak claims suddenly show a pattern (like coming from the same limited area). So I have no solution to the dilemma of bad reports overwhelming good reports — believers will continue to feel that skeptics are not open-minded enough, while skeptics think believers have allowed their brains to fall out ;). Meanwhile, just stay focused, think critically, and keep your eyes on the prize, I guess…. 


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Friday, December 15, 2023

— The Mason Spencer Effect —

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I currently have a lot of IBWO dribs and drabs on paper I might write posts about (or just skip), but today a couple of folks emailed me about the Ivorybill eBird report in south Texas, which I was already aware of, and for which I see no credibility to speak of, so no I won’t be addressing that here (unless of course something were to change). But it did get me thinking more about something I’d already been pondering. For years now, with so much Ivorybill publicity, IBWO reports from non- or inexperienced birders, average folks/everyday-people, have been regularly popping up in social media and internet forums (some are recent and some from years past) — they are almost always weak, poor, undetailed, and essentially lacking in credibility. Almost always these reports can be shown to be a non-IBWO species, or at the very least can’t be verified as IBWO… so why do folks continually glob onto these shallow claims with so much hope and interest, despite the odds against them (I’m leaving out here all the reports from EXPERIENCED birders and wildlife officials). It’s almost embarrassing… it’s certainly one reason believers are regularly mocked by serious birders who perceive them as gullible, if not foolhardy. In a similar vein, a common line you hear is that country folk who live or spend a lot of time in deep woods (unlike most birders, even serious ones) reeeeally DO KNOW Ivorybills, really have seen them… just happens that when offered $10,000 or even $50,000 to find them, oh gee, all of a sudden they can’t. Bird identification is tough, and sorry, I don't ascribe great birding skills to woods-folk (not that it's impossible, but just that it's rarer than people enjoy imagining). 


So why do so many believers keep falling for these feeble, rank amateur tales I wondered; why do they keep letting wishful thinking sully realism? There remains a deep-seated hope that somewhere along the way just one of them, just ONE, will be true, will be validated, and some ’nobody’ will gain instant fame; we root so much in America for the underdog, and we love to see the experts, the elitists, the intelligentsia nudged off their pedestals. Where does such an attitude stem from in the IBWO arena?  I think there’s an answer, which is the Mason Spencer story — I won’t repeat it, since most readers here know it (but if you don’t, I’ve referenced it many times in old posts including this summary from wonderful author Christopher Cokinos).


It is Mason Spencer who haunts us still today and almost single-handedly gives so many a possibly false hope that some unknown person, some average bloke, may be the one to stumble upon this remarkable species and bring this story finally to a beautiful conclusion. Personally, I don’t see it likely ending that way… I see it taking LOTS of hard work and skill getting the evidence needed, and I wish many ‘truthers,’ as they’re often called, didn’t so easily (almost embarrassingly), fall prey to amateurish storylines…. but on the other hand, I can't deny the legacy that Mason Spencer handed us... and moreover, I can't read the future with any certainty. 


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