Ivory-billed Woodpecker (formerly updates) (9 Viewers)

[humminbird]

A continuing and consistent line of reports means nothing... nothing at all. get me some evidence and i ll believe the long and consistent line of reports. i find it hard to believe that in all these years not even bark scaling was found... come on, get real.

Better read. Bark scaling is reported in almost every location!

 

[Jane Turner]

Possibly indicating just how unreliable an indicator of IBWO presence it is!

 

[pcoin]

... and bark scaling is not distinctive for IBWO

Better read. Bark scaling is reported in almost every location!

The idea that a particular pattern of bark scaling, especially the width of grooves created by the bird's bill, is distinctive for the IBWO, has been refuted by some of the very researchers who had originally claimed it was diagnostic. See Holzman and Sykes, Measuring the grooves made by large woodpeckers on bark-scaled trees:

Steve's Note: 8/3/07. Although this work has yet to be published, the authors wish to state that they no longer believe groove measurement can be used to indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Cameras and videotape should be used to indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.​

 

[humminbird]

The idea that a particular pattern of bark scaling, especially the width of grooves created by the bird's bill, is distinctive for the IBWO, has been refuted by some of the very researchers who had originally claimed it was diagnostic. See Holzman and Sykes, Measuring the grooves made by large woodpeckers on bark-scaled trees:

Steve's Note: 8/3/07. Although this work has yet to be published, the authors wish to state that they no longer believe groove measurement can be used to indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Cameras and videotape should be used to indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.​

Agreed, however that was not the statement. The statement I replied to claimed that bark scaling had NEVER BEEN REPORTED - a statement that is BLATANTLY false.

 

[chris murphy]

Tanner also noted that Ernest McDaniel, a native of the Big Thicket and former president of the Texas Ornithological Society, had searched for ivory-bill in east Texas for ten years with no success....

Should send Fishcrow in there, he'd have them nailed within ten minutes. With a blurry video to boot.

 

[humminbird]

I really think this is a myth--that reports were not followed up on for all this time. (Some were scoffed at--yes--that is because details and documentation were largely lacking.) !

As one who personally answers many of these calls and emails, I can assure you that most of them are NOT followed up on. I received one last week in a river system where there is currently a search ongoing. When forwarded to an ornithologist, I was told to reply that "when a clear photo or video is passed to us, we will follow up."

 

[PandionMlt]

Possibly indicating just how unreliable an indicator of IBWO presence it is!

Precisely my point... should have said confirmed IBWO bark scaling, if that is indeed possible to prove...

 

[EMalatesta]

I still believe the giant pecker lives and is probing around in a hole someplace in the deep south.

...and along with it I'm sure you'll find a Woolly Mammoth nearby.

 

[pcoin]

more on ignored reports

Well, here is the original statement you made:

Was it? There is a continuing and consistent line of reports since the 40's that have been completely ignored or scoffed at.

I showed, I think that, there has, in fact, been lots of follow-up over a period of decades. You said completely ignored--that is hardly the case.

As one who personally answers many of these calls and emails, I can assure you that most of them are NOT followed up on. I received one last week in a river system where there is currently a search ongoing. When forwarded to an ornithologist, I was told to reply that "when a clear photo or video is passed to us, we will follow up."

I don't think there is enough money in the world to follow up on all reports of IBWO--some judgment has to be exercised somewhere. Look at the fiascoes in Arkansas and the "Choc" of Florida--sketchy reports from chronically unreliable to sort-of-reliable observers. How many millions have been spent, and what has come of it after 3-4 years? How much lower should the bar go? As a US taxpayer concerned about conservation, like most of us on this forum, I am not happy about how low the bar has dropped.

In parallel experience to yours, I participate fairly regularly in local bird counts, and I have seen any number of rarities reported based on insufficient details. People do that frequently--sometimes even experienced birders make bad reports, and it is usually when they really want to see something rare. None of us are immune from the problem of expectation bias. (And looking at the reports of IBWO from Arkansas and the Choc, I don't think any of them would have passed muster with our regional count compiler for documentation of even a moderately rare species.)

In further parallel experience to yours, I occasionally have non-birder friends approach me claiming to have seen very unusual birds, including some extreme rarities. I was once approached by a very intelligent woman who claimed to have seen a Carolina Parakeet in captivity. I patiently explained to her that it was probably a common New World parrot. Should have I, instead, called the USFWS and insisted that a full-scale search be instigated?

Unfortunately, there is not an infinite amount of money, or even time, for worthy conservation causes--some judgment must be exercised at some point.

 

[MMinNY]

I haven't posted in a long time because there's been nothing new to say. Now, however, things have changed. Bret Tobalske has examined Mike Collins's actual March 29th footage; he hasn't jumped to conclusions based on viewing a couple of excerpts online. Mike's video includes about 7 seconds of the bird in flight, so even though field marks are poorly resolved, it still contains a lot of information. According to Tobalske -- certainly among the foremost experts on the subject and someone who probably has more pertinent expertise than anyone who posts here -- the bird is a large woodpecker with a wingspan of approximately 30 inches and a flap rate that's inconsistent with a Pileated. See Mike's post of May 1 for additional comments from Tobalske.

There's only one conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from this analysis. It may not be the magazine cover shot that some seem to be demanding, but it's pretty persuasive. At the very least, it should give pause to those who are so dismissive of this latest footage. At best, some people might want to start thinking about paying up.

 

[Apodemus]

"There's only one conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from this analysis."

Well, that's that then, I suppose.

 

[Fred Virrazzi]

Update on 3/29/2008 IBWO video

Solid reports of Ivory-billeds are coming in now from scientists in different locations. One of the few that can be openly spoken about here is due to the unprecedented and almost instantaneous access the researcher has given to his data from the Pearl River, LA search.

Collins’ tape of March 29, 2008 from the LA side of the Pearl River basin has been studied by the researcher widely considered the expert in flight dynamics of Pileated Woodpeckers et al. spp. Dr. Bret Tobalske has determined the bird is not a Pileated but is a very large woodpecker. This woodpecker has white in the trailing half of both dorsal wings showing with the suggestion of additional white on the upper back and of less white continuing onto a dark neck. The head and bill is completely unresolved as far as I know. The bird is flying at ~ 33 mph (tighten us those shutter speeds) and the wing flap frequency is well out of the range of level or any type of flight for a Pileated. The wings bend at the elbow, 90 degrees on the down stroke once on all (most?) wing cycles, meaning it’s not a duck.

I have spoken to the person that picked Dr. Collins up at the ramp after he returned from obtaining this video. He had a brief look at the bird and was saying it had two dorsal stripes. This area is only a few miles from where Kulivan had his long, spectacular sighting of a pair including their bills and all marks in ’99. Kulivan is on the IBWO Recovery Team (And I assume Graves will soon recuse himself as he should have already).

This tape was taken from a large cypress that was rigged by donations of time and gear to the search. Mike, not a small man, obtained this video from ~ 75 feet up in the tree at some risk to himself. The bird flew under the tree and represents a view never before afforded of a putative Ivory-billed. Although I an others have had disagreements with Mike this is dedicated work and more evidence that the Ivory-billed persists.

See www.fishcrow.com go to END of 2008 season log.

For those brethren that understandably need more evidence………… there are things called swamps and forests….. the water is warm, come join the fun. There is nothing that excludes you from giving a hand as a volunteer thereby not affecting the 2 trillion $ budget. Maybe it's a good time to urge Congress to increase ES and land conservation funding.

More is expected from “new” areas soon.

Good birdin’

Fred Virrazzi

 

[dave_in_michigan]

In case you're looking for it, Mike's commentary is on the video is on this page, and the actual video I believe is this one.

Here are some cropped stills from it:

 

[lewis20126]

More is expected from “new” areas soon.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

a

 

[Microtus]

From this little bit of video (http://www.fishcrow.com/flyunder_trailingedges.avi) with a bird obscured a good chunk of the time, someone was able to conclude that the flap rate was wrong for Pileated? And that the bird filmed is a large woodpecker?

I can't believe that all those conclusions can be drawn from a short blurry video of a distant bird.

 

[MMinNY]

Google Tobalske, if you don't know who he is. He's highly reputable, with specific expertise in woodpeckers and their flight patterns.

As I wrote, the actual video is approximately seven seconds long, and seeing brief excerpts on the internet is not the same as watching the actual footage, as Tobalske, some others, and I have done.

It's easy to take potshots when you're (willfully?) ignorant.

From this little bit of video (http://www.fishcrow.com/flyunder_trailingedges.avi) with a bird obscured a good chunk of the time, someone was able to conclude that the flap rate was wrong for Pileated? And that the bird filmed is a large woodpecker?

I can't believe that all those conclusions can be drawn from a short blurry video of a distant bird.

 

[dave_in_michigan]

animated gif slo-mo (Collins 29mar08)

Note: this is degraded because of the conversion to animated gif. It's just to display a quick slow motion view here...



Better than Luneau's anyway, IMO.

 

[Microtus]

Is the full seven seconds of the video available on the web?

 

[Louis Bevier]

a lot of crow

Bret Tobalske...hasn't jumped to conclusions based on viewing a couple of excerpts online.

It's easy to take potshots when you're (willfully?) ignorant.

There does seem to be a lot of crow here and not much else. I hope Mike Collins has offered his original field notes and raw video for archive and independent examination. If so, this will all get sorted out. I can see that by comparing what he originally posted as video of this bird to what is on his web site today, much has been changed substantially. This is troubling.

I cannot identify the images from what is available, and what we have is a "continuing and consistent line of reports since the 40's" that are simply unverified.

The unequivocal answer by the likes of Audubon, Bent, Dennis, etc., throughout the alphabet, all the way to duck hunters in Louisiana is that the Ivory-billed had a noticeably faster, duck-like, wing beat frequency noticeably faster than a Pileated.

The historical literature does not say Ivory-billed flapped faster than Pileated. Tanner and others frequently refer to the species' fast flight, but not to fast wing beats. Many people conflate these two things; yet speed and flapping rate need not be correlated. By contrast, what we do have is a direct comparative statement by James Tanner that flight pattern “cannot be used as a reliable field character” because he had “frequently seen Pileated fly directly, in no way different from the flight of the larger bird.” We just don't know what the wing beat frequency for Ivory-billed was apart from one sound recording (even that is not verifiable). None of the authors/observers Fred mentions measured wing beat frequency.

In addition we have the Singer T evidence that again show a higher wing beat frequency that may be at the high end of what a Pileated can accomplish in SHORT distances. We still have not seen any live PIWO or video of any Pileated, a common bird, that comes close to the Hz AND the distance of the flight of the Luneau bird.

I matched these quite closely without much effort. My Pileateds actually exceeded the Luneau bird's flap rate in escape flight (over dry ground that dropped away, unlike the over water flight in Arkansas). Other birds I recorded are at or near the rate exhibited in the same short flight thought to be a recording of an ivory-bill leaving its nest (if it's not the Red-bellied Woodpecker that is most prominently calling in the same line as the parabolic reflector). There is simply no basis to exclude Pileated based on wing beat frequency.

The graph I show on my web site is simply a replotting of Bret Tobalske's data with the addition of bars that show the wide range of variation seen in even a small sample size (the key reason why exclusion of Pileated by wing beat frequency is untenable). I also added points for Ivory-billed using Tobalske's regression equation derived from the data in the graph. This demonstrates what is an expected rate for level flight, nothing more. At slower speeds, birds flap faster. Again, Bret Tobalske provides data on this, showing that a magpie flapped at 1.44 times its average cruising frequency. Since the only measured rate for Ivory-bill, if one accepts the unseen and unverified take-off audio, is 8.4 beats per second, we can provide an estimated cruising wing beat frequency from that. It would be 5.8 beats per second. This is independently supports the notion that the average wing beat frequency for Ivory-bill is slower than what Cornell, Luneau, and Collins claim. Again, we don't know what the wing beat frequency of Ivory-bill was, and neither Mike Collins's video nor the Luneau video provide independent confirmation of it.

 

[pcoin]

spurious reports go back to 30's

Was it? There is a continuing and consistent line of reports since the 40's that have been completely ignored or scoffed at.

After I commented to the above previously, I ran across this account by Arthur Allen, written in 1939, from Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds, available here.

The calls of the two large species of woodpeckers are so distinct that they should not be confused with each other or with those of any other birds. The fact, however, that ivorybills are continually being reported, even from the Northern States, indicates how unobservant many people are and how necessary it is to stress even such conspicuous differences as those mentioned above.​

So while it is true that reports of the birds have continued to come in, it is also true that there have long been (even since the 1930's) clearly spurious reports from outside the bird's range as well. (For a humorous take on some of these, from 1983, see, of course, the article by G. Stuart Keith--the accounts of reported sightings are apparently factual. One or two of them may even be familiar to readers of this forum.)

Of course some reported sightings could have been genuine all this time. For me, what has always been damning is the inability to locate breeding birds near the report of a sighting, and in the continental United States for that matter. Cyberthrush, for instance, has just written a piece pointing out that IBWO should be comparatively easy to find while caring for fledglings. Has this happened in any of the "hot zones" in Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana? As was stated so succinctly a few pages back:

Absolutely. If the Cornell people actually found an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 2004 as they claimed, they'd be studying them now instead of trying to relocate one. Since the year of the claimed rediscovery, they've had four years of extensive searches and they've come up with nothing....