I think we are both saying the same thing. The ‘mess’ the smaller woodpeckers leave is mostly bark. I see it routinely at the bases of trees on top of snow. Your Green Woodpecker behaves more like our Northern Flicker - more of a ground feeder. The larger woodpeckers like our Pileated (the size of a crow) do the same as your Black, and leave wood chips around the tree. That’s all I was getting at.
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It would be important to “drill down” through the press releases and enthusiastic headline(s) and go directly to the source, which is currently a “pre-print” and has not been subject to peer-review (yet): see at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.06.487399v1.full
When reading the preprint, the reader has to keep in mind the narrative that often sounds definitive and conclusive as to the evidence (“multiple lines”) as though the triangulation of sensory information by the authors, matched with camera technology, and the comparisons of the Ivory-billed to the Pileated and to the Wood Duck - would then indicate the (current) survival of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. And yet, the reader also has to focus (and rightly so) on the word “apparent” that is used in some sentences (and paragraphs) to describe the less-than-definitive vibe (the collective evidence) that permeates the manuscript (again, it is a preprint - not a published article per se).
If I were an Editor or a peer-reviewer of the manuscript, I would ask the authors to “clean-up” the many images and clips that are juxtaposed in clumps because it seems like padding the manuscript to weave in historical sightings and information next to the “evidence” recently gathered and shared. I realize the intent could for comparison and contrast, but the overall effect is stacking the deck, when the current evidence should stand on its own. I am not saying the authors should have provided a video with Ultra HD 4K, but the “multiple lines” offered in the pre-print are also an appeal to keep hope alive, or an attempt to sustain emotional investment in biodiversity (especially around Earth Day 2022), and serve as reminder to the other so-called sightings that then turn economic (and less ecological) because of the tourism appeal (see https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7747061 - Arkansas town cashing in on purported IBWO observations).
I lived in southern Louisiana for about 23 years (childhood and young adulthood) and it was there that I became a naturalist and finished up with a degree in wildlife biology. It would simply be a momentous discovery if the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was observed, authenticated using evidence-based data, and corroborated by others that the IB Woodpecker exists. But…naturalists have both an emotional and a scientific connection to the environments around them…and enthusiasm can be joined with empirical data that passes muster with the larger community. Until then, the sighting(s) arouse curiosity and interest, and also generate further questions and concerns about leaping to conclusions.
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I’d love to believe Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are still alive in North America. However, I don’t find these photos convincing.
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“If wishes were horses, I’d own a ranch” (Lucinda Williams)!
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I thought there was a population of them in Cuba
As noted above:
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Here is my take on this:
– The evidence is crappy but analyzed extremely carefully. Would we all hope for better? Sure.
– Arguments to the effect that better evidence ought to be available and the IBWO should be more easily documented are based on what? Spend some time in/near the edge of a Louisiana swamp and tell me that you documented all the species present, including all rarities.
– Alex Lees’ diatribe picking apart the draft paper is unfortunate. It is frought with “I doubt that…”, and “one would expect…” and other such appeals to common sense. It’s mostly an emotional appeal, not a truly detailed point-by-point review of the data. The guts of his critique would not pass muster for a decent peer review.
– The authors of the paper (for many years now) have positioned themselves in a posture of “us against the scientists”. That’s an unfortunate and unhelpful dichotomy. Facts are facts, evidence is evidence (whether good or horrible). “Just the facts, ma’am.”
I have my own opinion about the data thus far collected, but it is not relevant to the discussion because it is completely derivative and based on 2nd- to 4th-hand knowledge of the field data.
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Having looked at the preprint, for me it has a serious bigfoot vibe. They observed a Pileated in a likely tree, and set up trail cameras to keep it under continuous observation. This yielded grainy photos of a bird. If it wasn’t an intentional hoax, it is merely extreme incompetence, for they knew what tree they were trying to observe it in, and put that tree under this extreme-low-quality surveillance.
In my own observations of Pileated, often they’re merely the size of a crow. But I have seen (and photographed) individuals much larger, the size of an adult (mountain) raven, eg, taller (though thinner) than the largest seagulls. They simply saw a small Pileated, and then a large one.
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The guts of his critique can be summarized as “the conclusions of this publication are not supported by the data and analysis presented.” This is a perfectly reasonable assessment supported by an adequate if grumpy critique. It is not and does not claim to be a peer review for publication. Lees is a bit rude but he isn’t wrong.
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I think for every reason it’s not an IBWO, there’s a reason why it could’ve been an IBWO. I want to keep my opinion as unbiased as possible but hear me out with this. There’s always going to be a disputing opinion on a rare bird sighting, that’s why we have state record committees. It’s why we have eBird reviewers. But we are all human and we’re making a judgement based on the notes of another observer. One person I know, who was a part of the Oregon Rare Bird Committee (ORBC), and is now the eBird reviewer for northeastern Oregon, said that just because the committee accepts a sighting, doesn’t mean it was real, nor does every declined sighting is false. He said that to me when he declined my sighting of the first Union County Magnolia Warbler, purely because me and the person who originally found it (who happens to be the professor of ornithology at OSU, and originally a Kansas native) did not get photos. The bird was super shy, and between the two of us, we maybe got 15 seconds of viewing time within an hour of struggling to find this bird. But just because we couldn’t get photos does mean we were not seeing what we were seeing.
The thing that bothers me the most about this IBWO sightings is that this is a project going on since 2012, and they couldn’t get one decent image? I mean at the minimum, a 2-star quality image in eBird terms? I own a number of trail cameras and yes, photo quality is not fantastic, especially from a distance, but surely, you can get something better than a silhouette on a trail. And if you know they’re there, then why are you physically going out there with a nice Canon Rebel T7 and wait for however long it takes to see these birds. It won’t be easy, and we have circumstances in which we have troubles finding something. Last year, I kept hiking the same series of trails in Oregon, hoping to see a Spruce Grouse. These were supposedly the “go-to” places for SPGR, and I was repeatedly told if I didn’t get the first time, I’d get them the next. I finally got them after my 15th hike. Another one for me is the Nashville Warbler. I finally saw my very first Nashville last summer, even though I’ve spent years looking in riparian habitat for them. Point I’m getting at here is, sometimes birds are there, right under your nose, but they are elusive. Is that the case for IBWO, I’d like to see what the research team did to try for real conclusive evidence.
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i have a question. Did pileated and ivory backed woodpeckers hybridize? If so it may be that the apparently frequent reappearance of birds with ‘some ivory billed traits’ that aren’t clearly ivory billed could in fact just be pileated woodpeckers with that backcross genetic still exhibiting some ivory billed traits sometimes, even things like the different bill cover and markings or different call. Is this something that is a possibility?
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What if I’m part of a group–even a small one–of researchers going at it for a decade? Looking specifically for one species that’s fairly large and visible? I’m very skeptical here
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The fact that it’s a preprint – that is, a manuscript that is put out there for public consumption but has not yet been subjected to formal peer review for journal publication – is troubling to me. I can understand issuing preprints for research that is truly urgent, such as for studies on Covid-19 where a potentially important finding should be provided to fellow disease researchers as quickly as possible, even if it ultimately doesn’t hold up scientifically during subsequent and lengthy peer review. But why was it so urgent to get this IBWO manuscript out in the public before it could be properly reviewed? Was it an attempt to do an end run around the formal review process? To get the media on board with the alleged discovery before the reviewers pick it apart? It all seems rather self-serving.
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The two species are in separate genera, which would be intergeneric hybridization. It’s extremely rare in controlled settings and even rarer in the wild, as opposed to interspecific and intraspecific (species and subspecies respectively), which are already infrequent occurrences. And considering the two species’ very distinct habits and calls, plus no mention or reference in past literature, I’m inclined to say I doubt it ever happened
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not necessarily. It’s becoming increasingly common to release preprints across a number of fields and research topics, regardless of the urgency or nature of the work. One of the main benefits is that you essentially get access to additional peer review, as other researchers can comment directly on the preprint and offer feedback.
For a recent paper I was co-author on about coral bleaching, we submitted it as a preprint, got two dedicated scientists giving their extensive thoughts, and we greatly improved the paper thanks to them before the actual peer review from the journal came back.
so maybe this is correct, and to be honest I think maybe I’d err to this in this case, but it’s not necessarily definitely the case, so it would probably be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt
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No hybrids were ever reported, and I doubt it would be possible.
Unrelated to the hybrid question, but just noting this, these images were originally announced on April 1, if that has any meaning.
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It would be an interesting and elaborate April Fools joke if that were the case.
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Does anyone know if Automated Recording Units (ARUs) have been deployed in the search for ivory-billeds?
I think the authors of the preprint make that fairly evident: The USFWS has published a proposed rule to declare the IBWO extinct. That action, if finalized, could have significant effects on efforts and funding related to the species. The finalization of that rule could potentially happen prior to the completion of any peer review due to the lag time of the latter process–whatever the outcome of that review. I viewed the distribution of the preprint and any subsquent publicity surrounding it as just an announcement to the effect of [my words], “Hold on, wait just a second before you finalize that rule. There’s some additional data that needs to be reviewed.” I don’t want to put words in the mouths of the authors, but that was my sense of the timing.
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Depends on the types of birds. There is a lot of intergeneric hybridization in ducks and hummingbirds; in fact, they seem to embrace it! But in a case like woodpeckers, hybridization in general seems pretty rare unless you’re a sapsucker (ugh, don’t bird the Cascades, everything there is Red-breasted x Red-naped). But on the other hand, conspecifics or closely related species are known to hybridize if the rarer species cannot find a suitable partner. It looks like the two are pretty distant in the phylogenetic tree, but once again, anything’s possible if there’s only IBWO left in a certain region.
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