Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

The current issue of the AUK, the Journal of the American Ornithologists Union, has a commentary by Dr. Jerome Jackson, one of the leading authorities on Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, explaining why he doesn’t believe that the current spate of sightings and the video and sound recordings of ivory bills from Arkansas are legitimate.

Dr. Jackson is a reputable researcher, and his opinion is based on some solid reasoning. But frankly, since well over a dozen different people, some who are well-known researchers and authorities in their own right have actually seen an ivory bill in the past two years, it seems to me that the weight of the arguments is entirely on the side of Cornell, the Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the many other individuals who say the ivory bill reports are legitimate.

Some people say that, to be scientific, the reports have to be repeatable. Well they have been repeated. There have been over a dozen people who have seen ivory bills, and the reports of diggings and trees that have been of a size larger than Pileated Woodpeckers could reasonably be said to produce, have been clustered in the exact same areas as recordings consistent with ivory bill vocalizations have been made.

I’ve spent almost a full month in Arkansas now, and after seeing the habitat and many of the spots where ivory bill reports have come from, I’m just as convinced as ever that these reports are valid. The trees here are thick. It’s been hard to get really good looks at piliateds and other common woodpeckers even though they’re abundant here, and even when I have my camera on I’ve had virtually no opportunities to get photos of flying woodpeckers or even most woodpeckers sitting out in full view. I figured to get the averages on my side I’d need to see at least a couple of hundred pileateds first, and after a month of seeing and hearing them, and I’m hearing plenty every day, I’m not even halfway there.

Why have so few ivory bills been heard? That seems a little obvious to me. Birds make more vocalizations when they have larger populations. In my own neighborhood in Duluth, back in the days when there were three or four pairs of robins sharing my backyard bird bath, at least one male sang all night long every night during the breeding season. But now that only one or two pairs remain, there’s no reason for these males to continually be proclaiming their territory, so robin songs no longer go all night long in my neighborhood. A tiny surviving population of ivory bills has little reason to vocalize or double knock very much, and few birds to vocalize or double knock too.

It doesn’t bother me in the least that Jerome Jackson is criticizing the ivory bill reports. It’s the job of scientists to be skeptical and to criticize the work of others, even as they strengthen their own work based on the criticisms of others. That’s the way we eventually arrive at truth.

Scientific discoveries require plenty of substantiation, but I’ve been mystified by the handful of lay people who have been pretending to be skeptics, ridiculing what they call faith-based ornithology on the part of people who believe the ivory bill reports, when actually these so-called skeptics seem to have even stronger faith that ivory bills are extinct, with less supporting data on their side than the people who believe they still exist.

And what upsets me more than anything is the fact that people are griping about the money currently going into protection of the Arkansas tracts where the ivory bills may be hiding out. Rather than begrudge the money going there because it isn’t going to other conservation projects as if there is only one small pie that can be divvied up, conservationists should be out there baking more pies, finding more sources of money, getting local people in other places as revved up about conserving their precious local birds as the people in Arkansas are growing about ivory bills. In a world of ever diminishing natural resources, we have to start baking more pies.

I’m Laura Erickson, speaking for the birds.