Nice job by Loren Coleman of reporting on a new professional publication analyzing what appear to be audio recordings of an ivory-bill from the Pearl River ares of Louisiana. This was the area of a famous sighting, which held up to expert analysis, by Dennis Kulivan in 1999.
COMMENT: I am hardly an expert on bird calls, but this is certainly intriguing. I thought the famous Arkansas video was identified accurately as an ivory-bill, and some evidence from Louisiana and Florida was very good. If I had to guess, though, the bird is functionally extinct: reduced to a handful of individuals so scattered they can never re-form a viable population. I sure hope I'm wrong.
3 comments:
The Collins paper is speculative rehash of old news and data... there are reasons that almost no serious birding forum, website, or listserv (including even the Louisiana birding listserv), is giving it much if any attention....
(Having said that, I believe a few Ivory-bills likely still remain, and may enter the Pearl River area on occasion. I'd be happy for Mike to conclusively document them; thus far he hasn't.)
Thanks for the expert opinion. Those of us who are interested amateurs have to be careful in general about uncritical acceptance of an argument just because it's published in a scientific forum (a journal on acoustics, in this case).
The sighting a number of years ago by an LSU student in the pearl river area was a very convincing. It wasn't by just anyone ambling through the woods and it wasn't just a fleeting glimps. I have more confidence in that sighting than I do of the video in Arkansas.
I sure hope one turns up for real somewhere.
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