birding-aus

Re: Ultimate Ticks and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

To: "Paul Coddington" <>, "birding aus" <>
Subject: Re: Ultimate Ticks and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers
From: "Ricki Coughlan" <>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 19:43:32 +1100
Hi Paul
 
We could go on in circles about this forever but I'm sure that you'll share my belief that conservation programs have to be undertaken properly. The stakes are too high and funding too limited to do it otherwise. Good science and robust data must be at the fore of these efforts. Funding should always be carefully metered out on the basis of the strength of evidence and needs demonstrated by careful study. So, an initial sighting should get a little funding to have a team in to detect the bird (two reputable birders or field ornithologists corroborating on a good view will do, a good photo even better) then, upon detection you can start to ramp things up a lot more. 
 
As for your idea that the footage of this bird which the Cornell team are touting as evidence of the rediscovery is "just short of being absolutely conclusive" I simply don't agree. After all, it is less than 3 seconds of cropped, highly pixilated, de-interlaced footage of a distant, partially obscured bird in which no field marks can be conclusively identified. That's not even a little bit conclusive. Their "improved version" shows one or two wingbeats from the same unidentifiable blurry blob phantom-bird. Getting in the "Bigfoot Team" to turn that blob into an IB Woodpecker has not convinced me in the slightest.
 
With the northern Spring coming they have practically put an army of birders together to track the Ivory-billed Woodpecker down in coming weeks, so we should at least get some kind of an outcome from that - preferably something positive. Last year, nobody had anything but glimpses of "maybes". Just a few people saying that they had fantastic views would do the trick but more totally crappy footage, recordings of knocks near camping grounds and roadways or Jethro Hogwrangler's eyewitness account that "it really looked like it for 1/10th of a second" will not convince me that it would be appropriate to divert massive funding from more worthy conservation projects.
 
I may sound like a "naysayer" in your books, but my first concern is getting conservation efforts right. We all yearn for the rediscovery of many wonderful species which have been lost due to human greed and folly, that's why so many people work so hard to hold back the tide of unnatural extinctions in the first place. However, I would never be so imprudent as to back the throwing of heaps of money away on projects which look very shakey in preference to those which are sure things.
 
Ricki Coughlan
Sydney, Australia
 
 
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