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New York Times Article about Ivory-Billed

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Linda Keenan

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Linda Keenan

Date:

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:23:35 -0500

Here's the article.

Linda Keenan


March 17, 2006
Top Birder Challenges Reports of Long-Lost Woodpecker 
By JAMES GORMAN
The New York Times

The ivory-billed woodpecker? That's the bird that went extinct, and was
rediscovered, and then there was some argument but it's all settled now and
the great creature lives, elusively, in an Arkansas swamp, with a chunk of
federal money to keep it comfortable. Right? 

Maybe not. The nation's best known birder, David A. Sibley, whose book "The
Sibley Guide to Birds" is a bible for field identification, has decided that
the happy ending is too good to be true. 

Mr. Sibley, a soft-spoken, attention-avoiding writer and illustrator of many
other bird books, says in an article being published today in Science that a
blurry videotape that was the strongest evidence of the woodpecker's
continued existence does not show an ivory bill at all. 

He and three colleagues write that the bird on the tape was almost certainly
a common pileated woodpecker and that there is simply no conclusive evidence
that the ivory bill has escaped extinction. 

The videotape, which has been called an ornithological Zapruder film, was
made on April 25, 2004, by M. David Luneau Jr., an engineering professor at
the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Professor Luneau had joined a
search led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to gather more evidence after
two serious birders reported seeing the ivory bill fly in front of their
canoe.

Along with sightings, the tape was the centerpiece of a spring 2005 paper,
also in Science, that caused jubilation among conservationists and birders
and prompted the federal government to commit $10 million for ivory bill
conservation. 

The majestic ivory bill, the largest woodpecker in the United States, had
been a poignant example of extinction from the last confirmed sighting in
1944 until the report of the rediscovery, when it quickly became a symbol of
hope, embraced by birders and the public.

Mr. Sibley said he went public with his critique reluctantly. But, he added:
"I think that this identification is wrong, and I feel that I'm obligated to
correct that. Conservation has to be based on science." 

Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
(www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory), said that he could not agree more about the
importance of scientific evidence and that he continued to believe that the
video clearly showed an ivory bill. 

Dr. Fitzpatrick and his colleagues have a rebuttal to the critique in the
same issue of Science. Although the critique is "carefully reasoned," it has
"technical errors," he elaborated in an interview, adding, " "Their
description of how a bird flies is incorrect."

"Really what they're doing is declaring that their view of the video is that
it is not definitive," Dr. Fitzpatrick said. "And that's almost by
definition true. If there are a few people who say, 'I don't know if I can
tell what that is,' then it's not definitive." 

But, he said, the accumulated evidence of sightings, sound recordings and
the tape are enough to show that at least one ivory billed woodpecker was in
the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in the winter of 2004. 

The argument is a classic scientific dispute, and if the bird were not such
a romantic creature, if birders were not fanatical about correct
identification and if a pot of federal money were not involved, the back and
forth would be unremarkable.

The paper comes after nearly two years of extensive searching in Arkansas by
Cornell teams for a clear photograph or videotape. In that time,
disagreement has been bubbling among birders and ornithologists in Internet
discussions.

And yet the rediscovery has had broad public acceptance. In fact, the three
men who first reported the sighting in Arkansas in 2004, Eugene Sparling,
Bobby Harrison and Tim Gallagher, will be honored tomorrow by the Explorers
Club in New York. 

In this context, the paper from Mr. Sibley, Louis R. Bevier of Colby College
in Maine, Michael A. Patten of the University of Oklahoma and Chris S.
Elphick of the University of Connecticut is a loud public salvo on behalf of
those who believe that the claims for the bird's continued existence go
beyond the evidence.

Among them is Kenn Kaufman, author of "Birds of North America" and a series
of other nature guides. Mr. Kaufman said his initial doubts about the
conclusiveness of the video had given way to a conviction that the bird was
a pileated woodpecker. 

"My best guess is that Gallagher and Harrison made a mistake," Mr. Kaufman
said. "They made an honest mistake. And everything just sort of cascaded on
from that."

The details of the disagreement are downright Talmudic. But simply put, the
question is whether the blurry white patches visible in the tape are on the
top of ivory bill wings or the bottom of pileated wings. The ivory bill is a
larger bird, up to almost 21 inches long, but the lowest estimate of its
length and the upper limit of pileated length overlap at about 19 inches. 

Mr. Sibley and his co-authors, along with Mr. Kaufman and other critics, say
the viewer is most likely seeing the underside of pileated wings on the
upstroke. They do not say the pileated case is airtight, but argue that the
images can not be counted as proof of an ivory bill. 

The Cornell rebuttal in the same issue - by Dr. Fitzpatrick, Martjan
Lammertink of the Cornell Lab and the University of Amsterdam, Kenneth
Rosenberg of the lab and Mr. Luneau - presents evidence that the viewer is
indeed looking at the back of an ivory bill as it flies away. 

Other ornithologists not involved in either paper had mixed reactions. 

Jeffrey R. Walters, a woodpecker specialist at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University who was one of the scientists who reviewed
the original report of the rediscovery for Science before publication, said
he thought that the evidence that the tape showed an ivory bill was better,
but that "I think it's fair to say that it's not definitive." 

J. Michael Reed at Tufts University, who had no role in the critique but is
a friend of Dr. Elphick, said that he had been impressed by the original
Science paper but that given the current dialogue, "the burden of proof is
to demonstrate that it's an ivory billed woodpecker, and I don't think
they've done it."

All parties are united in the hope that the bird, whether or not it has been
captured on videotape, is alive somewhere in the swamps. As Mr. Kaufman
said, "If somebody came up with decent video of an ivory bill tomorrow, I
would go out and dance in the streets."