Odd photo of Ivory-billed Woodpecker on Birdlife Intl. Site
The ever-vigilant Cyberthrush recently highlighted (
here) Birdlife International's
Quest launched to find 'lost' birds. At the top of the page is a very striking color illustration of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in flight (detail
here).
The illustration looks very fishy to me (as well as to another commenter on CT's site). It appears to be a modern digital photograph, with the out-of-focus background showing digital noise, not film grain. The wing-tips are blurred, as if in motion, exactly as in a photograph, an effect very difficult to reproduce in an illustration. I think I see some lines that look like artifacts from a (de-interlaced?) video frame in the background as well. The problem is, there are not, to my knowledge, anything like this quality of image from the modern "rediscovery" circa 2004.
Another point of "fishiness" is that the wing shape, to me, looks like that of a typical
Dryocopus woodpecker, such as a Pileated or Black Woodpecker. The few images I have seen of the Singer Tract Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in flight show a long, pointy wing-tip. (Hard to say on that one--wings are of such variable shape in flight.)
To me, this looks like an altered photograph of a different species of woodpecker, perhaps a Black Woodpecker,
Dryocopus martius. With a little Photoshopping, it would be pretty easy to make a photo of that species look like an Ivory-billed Woodpecker--one would just have to add white to certain feathers.
I find the use of such an altered photo (if that is what this is) in this context to be misleading. It looks like a modern photograph, and it shows, unmistakably, the field marks of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. No photographs of anywhere near such quality have come to light from the 2004 "rediscovery". Ironically, the BirdLife International web page barely mentions the Ivorybill--they are talking, mostly, about the (verified) 1992 rediscovery of the
Cebu Flowerpecker. The whole thing is just odd.