Best laid plans . . . I’m pushing back the posts on historic range and evidence but hope to get to them soon. In going through some of the remaining unexamined images from past trail cam deployments, Geoffrey McMullan came across an intriguing image. He sent me the file for the entire day without indicating […]
Summary Evidence collected by Project Coyote in two parts of Louisiana from 2009-2018 should, on its own, suffice to justify maintaining the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s current listing as an extant, endangered species in the United States. Others may differ, but I think the totality of the evidence does even more, making a compelling case that the […]
I’m reposting an entry from February 2015 with some new commentary as prologue. I recently received a Google alert about a new paper on statistical approaches to extinction relying on sight records. According to the paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed: We have shown that the rate of sightings is the strongest indicator […]
Part 1 of this report is here. Patricia opted to take the day off on the 19th, so I went out on my own and covered a lot of territory. I had been thinking hard about the hickories and the fact that, in virtually all cases, we’ve seen indications that bark is removed from these […]
On this trip, I was joined by Patricia Johnson (my wife) who was making her first visit to our search area in over two years. Phil Vanbergen was along on Friday, when a classmate of his, Jeremy Irion, spent also spent the day with us. Steve Pagans, retired forester at D’Arbonne National Wildlife Refuge, was […]
This was an eventful trip, with an extraordinary amount of activity on the first four days – including a possible sighting and several possible auditory encounters – and none at all on the last two. I was alone on October 13th, 17th, and 18th; Frank joined me from the 14th-16th. Conditions were generally good – […]
If you haven’t done so already, please read Trail Cam Photos Revisited for a more comprehensive discussion of the image that’s central to this post (including an explanation of our conclusion that the mystery bird is larger than a Pileated Woodpecker). At the time of writing, I didn’t envision doing a follow-up, but the nagging sense […]
I thought I’d address a couple of comments from ibwo.net written in response to the recent post on sightings and evidence from 1944-2003. Duck Stamp reminded me that Lewis’s story and identity were revealed in Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird, and Houston pointed out John Fitzpatrick’s discussion of the images in a presentation on the rediscovery. As far […]
This post is inspired in large part by an exchange of emails with Chris Sharpe, an ornithologist who is working on an IBWO literature review. Our correspondence revolved around the IUCN’s species account, which describes the ivorybill as “possibly extinct” and cites recent statistical analyses that suggest extinction is likely, as well as one that […]
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