I’m a bird enthusiast, and am also entertained by cryptids, thereby increasing and subsequentially decreasing my credibility to the matter.
The quality leaves something to be desired, though it certainly is difficult to immediately write this off as not an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (which is not to say that it is). The most compelling photo is in figures 2 and 3. The white saddle is intriguing, as the only other expected woodpecker to have this feature is a Red-headed Woodpecker, which is considerably smaller. The comparison photos in the third offer somewhat of a size comparison which makes it seem larger than a Red-headed Woodpecker, but it’s incredibly difficult to show this except if they were in the same place, as cameras render a 2d image that distorts depth which can have all sorts of funky effects on size.
I’m not a social media person but it would be fun to hear about how people are arguing if it is or isn’t.
Kenn Kaufman had a really nice writeup on the sighting which I’ll paste below:
"
Once again the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is in the news, with a team of researchers presenting grainy, distant photos and videos as evidence that this legendary bird still survives in southern U.S. swamps. Once again, controversy rages around the purported evidence: Do these images prove anything at all?
We’ve been through this before. The last clear photos of living Ivory-billed Woodpeckers were taken in the 1930s, and the last universally accepted sightings were in the 1940s. Since then, a certain cycle has repeated, with minor variations, over and over. Someone reports the rediscovery of the Ivory-bill in a surprising location. Initially there is jubilation—the bird is still with us! Then doubts set in as people pick apart the scanty evidence: the descriptions, the fuzzy and impossibly distant photos. Bitter arguments break out between believers and nonbelievers. As time passes with no more evidence forthcoming, hope fades and cynicism rises, and we wait for the next reports to surface.
In the past I’ve taken an active part in these arguments about the evidence, or lack of it. This time my view is different. It’s this: I’m just glad there are people who CARE so much about this bird.
Apathy kills. That’s true for wildlife as well as for humans. Around the world there are many millions of people, including many in positions of power, who do not give a flying fig about nature. They would not blink if even the most magnificent creatures faded to extinction, because they simply don’t care. They would not lift a finger to save any species. Of course, those who care passionately and those who don’t care at all represent the opposite ends of a spectrum, and many people fall somewhere in the middle. So the choice need not be so stark. But if it were, if I had to choose one extreme or the other, I would cast my lot with those who continue searching against impossible odds, with those who hope against hope that the big woodpeckers survive.
Yes, I recognize that the resources spent on these Ivory-bill searches could have been used, instead, to help endangered species that are definitely still with us. I have made that argument myself. But I also know people who had never thought about nature at all until tales of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker piqued their interest. The idea of a huge, flashy, mysterious, hyper-elusive grail bird of the trackless wilderness was enough to capture their imaginations. They would have scoffed at an obscure endangered species like Furbish’s Lousewort, but the giant woodpecker lit their fire. They care about it, they want to believe it survives. That is infinitely better than apathy, and somewhere down the road it may lead them to take action for other species that need the help.
So the periodic news stories claiming the rediscovery of the phantom woodpecker can serve a positive purpose.
Am I saying I believe the Ivory-bill is still with us? Well, no. Personally, I suspect it has been extinct for decades. But I would be absolutely overjoyed to be proven wrong, so my heart is with those who continue to search. I salute their passion and I applaud their efforts. Even if the impossible dream is never achieved, there is something magnificent in the act of dreaming it.
"
