-- Umm, Yes, I Have a Bit Too Much Time On My Hands --

 ------------------------------------------------------

I’ve been perusing some old posts that I don’t even remember writing (…I’m gettin’ old), and may do some updates of them, starting with this one:

9 Things NOT likely to happen in 2024… and one that might :

1. Sacha Baron Cohen releases his latest film entitled "Borat Wanders the American Southern Swampland In Search of that Very Most Elusive Ivory-beaked Woodpecker, For the Benefit of Mankind."

2. Steve Latta claims again to see an Ivory-bill in Louisiana but nobody believes him, when the bird in his only photograph appears to be an Imperial.

3. In a remarkable coincidence, David Sibley and John Fitzpatrick compete against one another in a new season of “Dancing With the Stars.”

4. The great great grandson of Mason Spencer walks into Van Remsen's LSU office one Friday afternoon and plunks down a freshly-shot Ivory-bill, inquiring, "So is this the dang thing you fellas been lookin' fer???"

5. Matt Courtman receives $1.5 million from George Soros’s Foundation to search for the IBWO (...and boy, is the National Aviary pissed!).

6. Donald Trump shoots an illegal immigrant on 5th Avenue, insuring a landslide victory in the Presidential election.

7. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg finally announce that they will henceforth rule the world as a triumvirate, and the rest of us should just STFU.

8. Peace on Earth

9. Jennifer Aniston marries Cyberthrush.

10. Photographs taken at a nesthole in Louisiana show 2 large black-and-white woodpeckers that everyone agrees are NOT Pileateds!

----------------------------------------------------

— Match Game —

———————————————————

Cold, windy weather has kept me inside lately doing mindless things… like creating this match-up game for readers. Column A has several names somehow connected with Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and column B has things those names may be significantly associated with… match them up (most are pretty easy, but a few might be more obscure… and yeah, there may be some ambiguity):

Column A                      Column B

1)  Alex Sanders            a) Project Coyote 

2) Bill Pulliam                 b)  Santee Swamp    

3) Bob Russell               c)  Fishcrow

4) David Martin               d) Imperial Woodpecker

5) Fielding Lewis             e)  National Aviary

6) Frank Wiley                 f) “the Chief”

7) Gene Sparling             g) Georgia Ivorybills

8)  Herb Stoddard           h)  LSU

9) James Kilgo                i)  Eskimo Curlew

10)  J.J. Kuhn                   j) “Ghost Bird” 

11)  Lester Short               k)  Moss Island, Tenn.

12)  Martin Collinson         l)  “Deep Enough For Ivorybills”         

13) Mary Scott                   m)  Fangsheath                

14) Mike Collins                n)  Big Woods kayaker 

15)  Scott Crocker             o)  British birder  & ‘crime-fighting hero’ 

16) Steve Latta                   p)  Choctawhatchee 

17)  Sufjan Stevens            q)  birdingAmerica.com     

18) Tyler Hicks                    r)  Singer Tract           

19) Van Remsen                s)  Cuban Ivoryblll      

20) William Rhein               t)  “And the sewing machine, the industrial 

                                                 god..."                  

                                                 

                                            

(answers will be given below in comments)

———————————————————

— Books ...& more — +Addenda

 —————————-------------——-——

Haven’t talked about IBWO books in awhile, but the topic came up over on FB so, for newbies primarily, will re-state what remain my favorite IBWO volumes (out of the growing number), with the caveat that I do have some problems or issues with most of these:

1)  The Ivory-billed Woodpecker — James Tanner

….the classic study that is sort of ‘must’ reading, but which also must be taken cautiously as an old, limited study primarily in a single locale of but a few birds, with conclusions/results that may or may not generalize well today. Important to be familiar with though because of the frequency with which other books will reference it.

2)  In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker — Jerome Jackson

….also, a sort of classic at the time it came out by one of the leading experts and defenders of the Ivory-bill (I have one of the first editions, but am guessing that later editions have been brought more up-to-date with some of the newer information and storylines).

3)  The Grail Bird — Tim Gallagher

….a fun, interesting read (with some new info) by someone intimately familiar with the Cornell endeavor in the Big Woods of Arkansas.

4)  The Race to Save the Lord God Bird — Phillip Hoose

….another fun, great read, with lots of pictures. Hoose is known as a writer for young people, but really this volume is for anyone.

5)  The Travails of Two Woodpeckers — Noel Snyder

….a lesser-known volume from a great ornithologist, with a slightly different take on some matters. (The second of the two woodpeckers under discussion is the Imperial of Mexico).

6)  Woody’s Last Laugh — J. Christopher Haney

…By far, my favorite volume (if you get and seriously read this one you don’t really need the 5 previous ones!). Not always well-organized, sometimes repetitive, and not without flaws, but easily the best overall compendium of Ivory-bill history and information available — even with more IBWO books likely in the works, I doubt any will surpass this volume for sheer comprehensiveness. SO much information (in both text and footnotes), it is a bit more of a slog to read than the other books, but worth it!

There are plenty of other volumes focused on, or with chapters about, the IBWO, but I don't regard them as foundational as the above works.

Now, for some different entertainment (...and my own oddball reasons), will pass along the below interactive puzzle. It is a weaker takeoff on Andy Naughton’s marvelous, old “Flash Mind Reader” (which I can't find a good working example of on the Web right now)… this one is not as good as Andy's, but operates in same way:

https://www.transum.org/Maths/Investigation/Mind_Reader/

Next, here are several of the optical illusions I have posted on the blog before:

https://twitter.com/Woofkoof/status/1467904569279762440

https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1117597108259831808

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1467063629564448770

https://twitter.com/TechAmazing/status/1335798167661662212

https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1465919065998782469

https://twitter.com/ThePoke/status/820926823479513088

https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1470506334126628866

https://twitter.com/rajdeep_baral/status/1308711678553415681

https://twitter.com/sinix777/status/1384916614202679298

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWfFco7K9v8

Lastly, almost in a similar vein, here is a recent post of interest from Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/179784035376368/permalink/7342075399147160/?mibextid=c7yyfP

—————————-----------------——

ADDENDUM 1/15:

More books…:

I tend to approach controversial subjects from a cognitive psychology background so maybe worth citing some of the works I’ve enjoyed that address the way the mind and human thinking works (at the end of his “Woody’s Last Laugh” volume Dr. Chris Haney also offered a brief list of such books, and there are many more currently available for a mass audience). The below is a somewhat eclectic mix of a few I particularly like, in alphabetical order:

A Field Guide to Lies  — Daniel Levitin

Beyond the Hoax  — Alan Sokal

How Not To Be Wrong  — Jordan Ellenberg

How The Mind Works  -- Steven Pinker

Language In Thought and Action  — S.I. Hayakawa

Mindware  — Richard Nisbett

Thinking Fast and Slow  — Daniel Kahneman

Thinking 101  —Woo-kyoung Ahn

-----------------------------

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

-------------------------------------------------------

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.” 

-------------------------------------------------------

— Silence Is Not Golden —

 ------------------------------------------------------

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.)

------------------------------------------------------

— Two Challenges — +Addenda

———————————————————

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....

———————————————————

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

--------------------------