http://www.birdchick.com/2009/03/ghost-bird-movie.html
As regular readers will know, I am very fond of the Birdchick Blog of the delightful Sharon Stiteler, and I felt unreasonably guilty the other day when we knocked her down a place on the leader board of the Nature Blog Network . I read her blog with my naturalist hat on, rather than my cryptozoological one, but occasionally she throws up a crypto gem like this remarkable overview of the politics surrounding the supposed rediscovery of the ivorybilled woodpecker.
As any fule kno, this magnificent bird was generally believed to be extinct from the late 1940s. However intermittent sightings, most recently (and most celebratedly) in 2004/5 in Arkansas have left a bloody big question mark over its status.
I still remember Richard telephoning me in the middle of the night, on the day that the CFZ expedition left for Mongolia. I was fast asleep, but soon woke up when Richard gave me the news that - to quote Wikipedia - "A group of seventeen authors headed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reported the discovery of at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a male, in the Big Woods area of Arkansas in 2004 and 2005, publishing the report in the journal Science on April 28, 2005 (Fitzpatrick et al., 2005).
As regular readers will know, I am very fond of the Birdchick Blog of the delightful Sharon Stiteler, and I felt unreasonably guilty the other day when we knocked her down a place on the leader board of the Nature Blog Network . I read her blog with my naturalist hat on, rather than my cryptozoological one, but occasionally she throws up a crypto gem like this remarkable overview of the politics surrounding the supposed rediscovery of the ivorybilled woodpecker.
As any fule kno, this magnificent bird was generally believed to be extinct from the late 1940s. However intermittent sightings, most recently (and most celebratedly) in 2004/5 in Arkansas have left a bloody big question mark over its status.
I still remember Richard telephoning me in the middle of the night, on the day that the CFZ expedition left for Mongolia. I was fast asleep, but soon woke up when Richard gave me the news that - to quote Wikipedia - "A group of seventeen authors headed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reported the discovery of at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a male, in the Big Woods area of Arkansas in 2004 and 2005, publishing the report in the journal Science on April 28, 2005 (Fitzpatrick et al., 2005).
One of the authors, who was kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, Monroe County, Arkansas, on February 11, 2004, reported on a website the sighting of an unusually large red-crested woodpecker. This report led to more intensive searches in the area and in the White River National Wildlife Refuge, undertaken in secrecy for fear of a stampede of bird-watchers, by experienced observers over the next fourteen months. About fifteen sightings occurred during the period (seven of which were considered compelling enough to mention in the scientific article), possibly all of the same bird. One of these more reliable sightings was on February 27, 2004. Bobby Harrison of Huntsville, Alabama and Tim Gallagher of Ithaca, New York, both reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker at the same time. The secrecy of the search permitted The Nature Conservancy and Cornell University to quietly buy up Ivory-billed habitat to add to the 120,000 acres (490 km²) of the Big Woods protected by the Conservancy".
This is all very well and good, but subsequent events have not done anything to confirm the continiued existence of this enigmatic bird. Sharon gives us an insight into the political machinations surrounding these events, and I strongly urge all CFZ Bloggofolk to go and take a look.
In the meantime, here for your delectation, is a song about the woodpecker from the rather excellent Sufjan Stevens:
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