[HN Gopher] Multiple lines of evidence suggest persistence of th...
___________________________________________________________________
Multiple lines of evidence suggest persistence of the ivory-billed
woodpecker
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-05-19 19:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| mickhead23 wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| 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/
| nemo wrote:
| 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.
| nly wrote:
| So with all that footage, did they see one or not?
|
| Surely evidence becomes fast at some point.
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "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'.
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| They do have photos - read the paper - but they're not high-
| quality enough to positively identify the woodpecker alone.
| rozab wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Maybe they should be in the "elusive" category?
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| bwestergard wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
| djtriptych wrote:
| Add in that it's theorized they explicitly seek out areas
| that are hard for humans to get to.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-20 23:01 UTC)