Multiple lines of evidence suggest persistence of the ivory-billed woodpecker | Hacker News Reader

Multiple lines of evidence suggest persistence of the ivory-billed woodpecker

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

34 pointsbookofjoe14 comments

It's sad that they're extinct, but I think it's really likely they are. This paper reads like desperate cryptozoologists more than serious scientists.

>Although these observations lack photographic verification...

>I understand that my sighting is awful, in so far as I saw none of what we consider classic field marks of an Ivorybill, and I had no opportunity to observe the bird for any length of time. However, I am also confident in identifying this bird as an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

If anything the fact that there's no meaningful evidence provided that's unambiguous makes a more compelling case that there's nothing there to find. The imagined calls can't be meaningfully distinguished from a pileated without further evidence, and the "double-tap" is not unambiguous evidence either. The videos are amazingly bad with nothing in them couldn't be a pileated that I saw. The vast habitats they once depended on are gone. Not a single feather from which DNA evidence could be tested nor any clear photo. We're firmly in cryptozoology territory with this paper, as always. More ivory-billed truther material.

The preprint of this paper spawned this r/hobbydrama post a while back. I think the discussion in the thread is sensible

https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/zqvler/birding_...

I think this subreddit is fantastic, getting the scoop on a topic from someone within a niche community just gets you way more context than any news article. Basically, ivory billed woodpeckers are a meme in birding because the evidence for their continued existence is so laughably bad. News outlets are still buying it.

Most people agree the evidence isn't compelling at all. Birding takes some amount of discipline because you can be susceptible to wishful thinking and 'see what you want to see.' Sadly, this species vanished along with its preferred habitat.

Here's the one good historical recording that is widely available (From 1935)

https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/peterson-field-guide-to-bi...

If you have any interest in birds or bioacustics or ML or such not, learning to id birds by sound either by ear or via ML is pretty neat.

ID birds by spectrograph http://earbirding.com/blog/book https://earbirding.com/blog/specs

Merlin ML based bird ID app https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ by Cornell Lab of Ornithology https://www.birds.cornell.edu/

Sibley's argument - that we would expect any true sighting to be quickly confirmed in follow up visits - is extremely compelling. Follow up visits have never produced clear photographs.

I've very recently become involved with monitoring a threatened bird species on the West coast. After about a dozen visits to areas where they have been positively identified in the past few years and using active measures to attract and detect them, I finally saw one for the first time last night. At two sites where they have been positively visually identified during visits this season, the detection is below 50%. i.e. they are detected during fewer than half the site visits.

All that to say that "quickly confirm[ing] in follow up visits" isn't as easy or guaranteed as one might assume - especially with a bird that seems to have a large range, sparse-if-any population, and wary nature.

Add in that it's theorized they explicitly seek out areas that are hard for humans to get to.

The interesting part is that if they declare them as extinct, then they are no longer protected. No big deal of it's really extinct, but maybe problematic if they aren't.

Baloney. This evidence is poor. No serious birder considers them to still exist.

So with all that footage, did they see one or not?

Surely evidence becomes fast at some point.

> "Skilled, reliable observers associated with our team, all abundantly familiar with Pileated Woodpecker, Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), and other birds of the area, reported 16 visual observations deemed by the observer to be probable Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Seven of these were of high enough quality that the observer considered the sighting to be definite (See Appendix 1). Although these observations lack photographic verification, many are supported by field drawings."

So they are pretty sure they saw some 'the observer considered the sighting to be definite' but they don't have any photographs 'observations lack photographic verification'.

The audio recordings they captured are pretty compelling to me as someone with a bit of interest in and experience with id-ing birds by sound.

They do have photos - read the paper - but they're not high-quality enough to positively identify the woodpecker alone.

Maybe they should be in the "elusive" category?

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