Snowy1 said:
quoting Piltdownwoman:
"get a better camera and sound recording equipment - or your searches are doomed. You say you got these birds calling all the time, flying over your head etc etc etc - get a better photo!"
Piltdownwoman, you say that you have been in the field. From the comment above, I begin to wonder. Do you have any idea what Mike went through to get the video he did, regardless of the quality? If not, I strongly suggest you read his comments earlier in the thread when he was in the field. What you are asking is easier said than done and even though I've never met Mike, I have to defend the guy in some fashion from a continuous, undeserving bashing.
For anyone who has done any real searching for the Ivorybill (and by real searching I don't mean driving refuge roads) you'll know that obtaining a video in that type of habitat is very difficult. Obtaining a video of an Ivorybill may take years. Plain and simple. For the armchair Ivorybillers on this thread to essentially say: "take your videos and take a hike" well, is just not good enough and not acceptable. That type of talk is just not constructive.
The same goes for the Nolin videos. Here's a guy who spends days/weeks attempting to recreate the flight pattern of the IBWO in the Luneau video and because some of his birds are slightly higher or flying slightly faster he receives comments such as "go take another video and bring your shotgun to alter the flight paths" or some rediculous comment along those lines.
If the work people are doing to attempt to resolve this situation is not good enough for some, then I ask those people to go out and do the work themselves and submit "better" work. I challenge you - see what you can do!
I am not bashing the guy. Look his posts, which I have read and I have even read his website, they indicate that he had multiple sightings with a bird many people think is, at best, the rarest bird in North America, and at worst extinct. Can we agree on that at least?
Next, there is no widely accepted documentation that this species is extant. Can we agree on that?
That said, if you publish a web site with reports of multiple sightings, none of which are seen by anyone else, you can expect to be met with skepticism at best. This just isn't good enough to make the claim of IBWO. If there was really an opportunity to see these birds multiple times it needed to be taken more seriously - not one guy out in a secret location with a leaky kayak and some bad recording equipment. Why no help at the scene? If it is federal land, why no feds involved? Why is no one there now?
Bad information on one person's part does not require that anyone else drop what they are doing, say working with Endangered Species, to dash off and disprove the work. So the "oh just go do it yourself" argument is not valid.
I really think one of the diservices that was done by the "acceptance" of the Luneau video was to significantly lower the bar of what is an acceptable record of a rare bird. These vidos are worse and are posted in an edited form.
Also, this - "we can't search in the summer" paradigm is really silly. Both CLO and the poster are claiming multiple IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER sightings everyone! Hello - EXTINCT BIRD! They should be out there 24/7/365 until they can prove it!
The statement from the poster was that there had been no critique - I was explaining a few reasons why - not bashing. The videos of the PIWO at the feeder are really interesting and valuable. We need more of this. Go to ID Frontiers to see that people are taking those videos seriously.
I have lugged enough junk around field sites for 25 years to know that it is a pain in the neck, I've managed grants and people in very remote places. Somtimes you make mistakes - lens cover on, forget to measure the air temperature, dump the kayak, leave your pencil at home. But ususally, after a little while, it does come together and you document what is there. Sometimes what you document is that you were wrong. CLO documented that there are PIWOs in their study sites, Fishcrow has documented that there are edited videos of what appear to be PIWO at his site.
To paraphrase - the more prepared you are the luckier you are.
