Plenty of examples of aberrant Pileateds
You should be asking Cornell. TWO team members have now admitted there were aberrant Pileated Woodpeckers in the study area. In this Arkansas Times article, it says the following:
Arkansas State University professor of wildlife ecology Jim Bednarz has seen several pileated woodpeckers with an abnormal amount of white wing feathers in the Cache River refuge. With Team Elvis, he pursued three birds that showed a flash of white in flight and white on their backs as they were perched. All were pileated.
Also, I remind you that in this Birder's World article it says the following:
A questioner asked Rosenberg (who admitted that he was hoping to time his talk so as not to have to take questions) if members of the search team had observed any Pileated Woodpeckers with aberrant plumage. Rosenberg said that there were reports of such birds, and that he had seen a photograph of a Pileated that was missing upper-wing coverts. The missing feathers exposed more white than usual on the bird’s wing.
Again CORNELL says they have a photo, and TWO team members say there were "freak" Pileated Woodpeckers IN THE STUDY AREA.
Another example of an aberrant Pileated Woodpecker is posted in Tom Nelson's Ivory-bill Skeptics Blog and is from Noel Snyder's book The Carolina Parakeet
Surely, mistakes in identification are sometimes made even by highly competent observers. Two examples from my own experience illustrate the risks clearly. One was a sighting of my own of an apparent Ivory-billed Woodpecker in central Florida in 1979. This was a bird that I flushed from a log in working through a hammock east of the Archbold Biological Station. The bird flew up to the vertical trunk of a pine only a few yards distant, and I could plainly see that it was a very large woodpecker with distinct large white secondary triangles on its folded wings, the most diagnostic field mark of the ivory-bill in distinguishing it from the somewhat similar Pileated Woodpecker.
Had the bird flown on immediately after I detected it, I would have been forever sure that I had seen a living Ivory-bill. But the bird remained perched on the pine trunk, giving me time to examine it more closely with binoculars. I soon determined that the white triangles on the bird's wings were in fact cream in color, not pure white, and in fact there were two black feathers intermixed with the cream-colored secondaries on the bird's left wing. Further, the bird lacked the huge white bill of an ivory-bill and instead had the much smaller black bill typical of a Pileated Woodpecker.
Since Pileated Woodpeckers have been mistaken for Ivory-bills hundreds of times in the past, and since the team was LOOKING for Ivory-bills, and since there were Pileated Woodpeckers IN THE AREA with more white than usual on their wings, and since the trailing white on the wings was the ONLY field mark most of the observers noted, doesn't it seem like a rather huge coincidence?
The video is EXTREMELY poor, and the top ivory-bill expert in the world, and several other top ornithologists, say the video shows a PILEATED woodpecker.
On this thread, it seems the most popular debating point is the credentials of the skeptics. All of the following people are skeptics. Again, I think few if any of the skeptics are saying the survival if the IB is impossible, just that it hasn't yet been proven.
1. David Sibley, bird book author
2. Kenn Kaufman, bird book author
3. Jerome Jackson, "world's foremost expert on the ivory-billed woodpecker"
4. Richard Prum, ornithologist, Yale University
5. Mark Robbins, ornithologist, University of Kansas
6. Gary Graves, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of birds
7. Michael Patten, ornithologist, University of Oklahoma
I challenge the believers to make a similar list of credentialed experts who have ACCEPTED Cornell's "proof."
timeshadowed said:
You should be asking Cornell. TWO team members have now admitted there were aberrant Pileated Woodpeckers in the study area. In this Arkansas Times article, it says the following:
Arkansas State University professor of wildlife ecology Jim Bednarz has seen several pileated woodpeckers with an abnormal amount of white wing feathers in the Cache River refuge. With Team Elvis, he pursued three birds that showed a flash of white in flight and white on their backs as they were perched. All were pileated.
Also, I remind you that in this Birder's World article it says the following:
A questioner asked Rosenberg (who admitted that he was hoping to time his talk so as not to have to take questions) if members of the search team had observed any Pileated Woodpeckers with aberrant plumage. Rosenberg said that there were reports of such birds, and that he had seen a photograph of a Pileated that was missing upper-wing coverts. The missing feathers exposed more white than usual on the bird’s wing.
Again CORNELL says they have a photo, and TWO team members say there were "freak" Pileated Woodpeckers IN THE STUDY AREA.
Another example of an aberrant Pileated Woodpecker is posted in Tom Nelson's Ivory-bill Skeptics Blog and is from Noel Snyder's book The Carolina Parakeet
Surely, mistakes in identification are sometimes made even by highly competent observers. Two examples from my own experience illustrate the risks clearly. One was a sighting of my own of an apparent Ivory-billed Woodpecker in central Florida in 1979. This was a bird that I flushed from a log in working through a hammock east of the Archbold Biological Station. The bird flew up to the vertical trunk of a pine only a few yards distant, and I could plainly see that it was a very large woodpecker with distinct large white secondary triangles on its folded wings, the most diagnostic field mark of the ivory-bill in distinguishing it from the somewhat similar Pileated Woodpecker.
Had the bird flown on immediately after I detected it, I would have been forever sure that I had seen a living Ivory-bill. But the bird remained perched on the pine trunk, giving me time to examine it more closely with binoculars. I soon determined that the white triangles on the bird's wings were in fact cream in color, not pure white, and in fact there were two black feathers intermixed with the cream-colored secondaries on the bird's left wing. Further, the bird lacked the huge white bill of an ivory-bill and instead had the much smaller black bill typical of a Pileated Woodpecker.
Since Pileated Woodpeckers have been mistaken for Ivory-bills hundreds of times in the past, and since the team was LOOKING for Ivory-bills, and since there were Pileated Woodpeckers IN THE AREA with more white than usual on their wings, and since the trailing white on the wings was the ONLY field mark most of the observers noted, doesn't it seem like a rather huge coincidence?
The video is EXTREMELY poor, and the top ivory-bill expert in the world, and several other top ornithologists, say the video shows a PILEATED woodpecker.
On this thread, it seems the most popular debating point is the credentials of the skeptics. All of the following people are skeptics. Again, I think few if any of the skeptics are saying the survival if the IB is impossible, just that it hasn't yet been proven.
1. David Sibley, bird book author
2. Kenn Kaufman, bird book author
3. Jerome Jackson, "world's foremost expert on the ivory-billed woodpecker"
4. Richard Prum, ornithologist, Yale University
5. Mark Robbins, ornithologist, University of Kansas
6. Gary Graves, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of birds
7. Michael Patten, ornithologist, University of Oklahoma
I challenge the believers to make a similar list of credentialed experts who have ACCEPTED Cornell's "proof."
