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Hi Paul
It's a bit difficult for me to continue to
contribute to this thread when most of my postings are not getting up. As for
your rebuttal of my use of the term "most" I disagree with you. I've been
following this matter closely and certainly most experts are not satisfied that
we should be getting too excited yet.
I will say that this delving into the
minutiae appears something like a bunch of tickers trying to turn a
fleeting sighting into a rarity which they hope that it will be. Or,
if you like, it's almost like the "Bigfoot" images of the seventies and eighties
and the endless analysis we were subjected to back then.
Having said that, some of what this
group are saying does look good and they might be onto something. We all
surely hope that they are. However, remember that these people are
attracting, and hope to attract
more, big conservation funds on the basis of a second
or two of footage of a distant bird as it flew off through a fairly dense
forest - a bird which closely resembles another, which is not uncommon in those
same woods. All this was shot out of the corner of a lens from a
wobbling canoe by a pretty basic camera. These people also have
absolutely no other acceptable evidence of the birds' continued existance.
In my books, the evidence doesn't yet justify the
funnelling of too much money away from very pressing conservation issues
elsewhere and conservation funding is very scant under the current
administration in the US.
As a graphic designer and web developer I can
assure you that you can make anything look very sexy and believable on the
internet, but it doesn't amount to truth. What these folk have put up online is
not a properly referenced, refereed or published set of data and
therefore has no further substance or authority than either yours or my
maunderings on the subject here on Birding-Aus.
Ricki Coughlan
Sydney, Australia
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