The day after the amazing announcement that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct after all, some skeptics have emerged.
Nick Matzke, at The Panda's Thumb, despite an admitted lack of expertise, worries that the bird seen may not actually be an ivory-bill.
... I’ve got a bad feeling that hopes are going to be dashed again. What they’ve put up in terms of data is scans of field notes and a detailed analysis of one very short video that is being interpreted right at the limits of its resolution.
As I mentioned yesterday, my initial reaction also was disbelief, but when I read how confident the experts are about this, how they spent over a year working on confirmation, I became convinced. Then I read the paper, watched the video, and remained convinced. Matzke's concern about the video is unfounded, in my opinion. Perhaps my confidence in the analysis of the video is a remnant of my background in astronomy. I am very used to the process of teasing significant amounts of information out of noisy, low-resolution data. By comparison with much of what astronomers frequently work with, the woodpecker video is extremely detailed. And, of course, the video is just the icing on the cake of the numerous sightings by expert ornithologists.
Meanwhile, Carl Zimmer, seconded by Chris Mooney, cautions that just because some ivory-bills may still live, much ecological devastation has already occurred, both in the U.S. and around the world, and numerous other species may be doomed. Of course this isn't exactly news and so should do nothing to allay the joy that at least one species thought extinct may still have a chance at survival. If a few ivory-bills could survive on their own for decades with no special protections for its habitat, the species should have a decent chance for longer-term survival now that such special protections will be put in place.
Finally, PZ Myers at Pharyngula lets his cynical side come to the forefront:
Call me a cynic, but my first thought was that one bird does not a species make, and that I don't find cause to celebrate in the fact that we made it to the wreckage in time to catch the last gasps of a magnificent animal. "We killed them all…but one!" is not an inspiring rallying cry for environmentalists.
Fortunately, Myers' imagined rallying cry is almost certainly not true. Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life publishes an email distributed by Scott Weidensaul, a nature writer who was a participant in the search party in Arkansas. He writes (emphasis added):
The sightings were all of a single bird, always a male (though there was one undocumented sighting of a possible female). It appears the search team was not operating near the bird's normal home range, since the sightings averaged only about one per month; this is a huge area, and there's lots of room for even a duck-sized woodpecker to disappear. No one thinks it likely that this bird is the very last of its kind, so it's likely there are more out there in the huge Big Woods region, or in other bottomland forests along the Mississippi Delta.
Interestingly, in contrast to the noisy, fairly tame behavior Jim Tanner recorded for the species in Louisiana in the 1930s, this bird has proven incredibly shy and wary, always vanishing at the first hint of a human. Many people -- and I include myself in this -- had long assumed that if ivorybills survived in the U.S., someone would have found and documented them decades ago. The fact that so many people, backed up with technology like automated recording devices and cameras, had such a hard time getting documentation in the Big Woods, suggests we've been underestimating the difficulty of finding this species. The "intensive" Pearl River search [in 2002], for example, involved six people for 30 days; most times that a sighting has been followed up, it's been someone in a canoe poking around for a day or two at most. One lesson from the Big Woods is that we cannot easily dismiss any of the reports elsewhere in the species' historic range, especially those in South Carolina and Florida which have been persistent for many years. I know scientists are following up on some of those reports even as the news is trumpeted from Arkansas. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.
This is one of the most hopeful stories I've ever had the privilege to report on, and it comes at a time when conservationists need some good news. It shows how incredibly resilient nature can be if we give it a chance.
Indeed, we need some good news, and this definitely counts. What happens next is up to all of us, but at least there is hope.
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