Recent History

Less than a year ago, Steve Sheridan's photo from Illinois that showed an intriguing woodpecker with a red crest and white shield was made public. For quite some time before that, the photo had been known and circulated in secret.

In looking at that image, we all went to substantial lengths to explain its features and explain away its anomalies. The presence of the white shield, the absence of visible dorsal stripes, the shape of the neck stripe, all that was contemplated and discussed at length. When we found things that didn't quite add up, we attempted to account for them as tricks of light, oddities of posture, whatever. We did this even when we could not find any good supporting evidence that our hypotheses were plausible. Why did we do this? Well, because Steve appeared completely sincere and forthright about his image, and because it seemed clear that he would lose far more by fabricating an image than he could possibly gain. Even when we got the first hard data that suggested the image might be bogus, we assumed the data were wrong. Not until the third time those measurements were confirmed did the wall begin to crack; in fact, Steve actually cracked first and confessed before any of us had the chance to proclaim the image a fraud.

In the case of Steve Sheridan, both his sincerity and his photograph were faked. But why?

Steve had been searching in the area extensively. He had both audio encounters and sightings that he was unable to document with recordings or photographs. He knew there were Ivorybills there; he might have been right about this, we can't say. But he could not come up with the proof needed to get others to share his conclusion. In a fit of frustration, he fabricated the proof. In his mind he was only generating the photo that he should have been able to capture legitimately; he was not misrepresenting the presence of Ivorybills at the site, he was in fact trying to help the Ivorybills by getting others to believe in them as well. His certainty in the presence of real Ivorybills at the site probably made it easier for him to project the facade of sincerity and honesty about his bogus image. It is far easier to lie when you are convinced that the lie really could (or should) be true.

He may have been right; there may have been Ivorybills there, and he may have seen and heard them. Nonetheless, his photo was fake.

We who do not learn from our past are condemned to repeat it.

The Secret to Success

The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Back Away

I am washing my hands of all things Rainsong. This is not a story line or cast of characters I care to have further association with. Apologies to those who came here seeking information on the matter.

Good for a chuckle

Another rare bird in another undisclosed location; nothing at all ivory about this one, however.

On the Savannah, Tennessee, Christmas Bird Count yesterday I happened across a totally unexpected male Vermilion Flycatcher (yes, at a remote cypress-lined pond). The notes I scribbled on the back of a tally sheet as soon as I got back to my truck are pretty amusing (click for full-size but not much more legible version):

In documenting rare birds, immediacy supersedes polish and flair!

Anyone in Tennessee who comes across this and wonders why they haven't seen this bird on the RBA and mailing lists, well... it is on private land used by duck hunters, not visible from any public road. In the interest of preserving landowner relations and rights and avoiding the installation of "NO TRESPASSING" signs at the site, the location isn't being revealed.

Joe Lieberman is a filthy hypocritical scumbag.

Perhaps that is too nice of a description for the Senator from Pharma.

I've hated him since 2000, and he's only gotten worse. His right-wing stump speeches in the 2000 presidential campaign were probably enough all by themselves to drive the critical number of voters away from Gore. But what does he care? The Bush years were superb for his real constituency (the pharmaceutical industry). Now his only interest is protecting their predatory profit margins.

P.S. There are 40,800 hits on Google for "Joe Lieberman" scumbag.

Not San Francisco

Not New York.

Not Boston.

Houston!

Suck on THAT, "Blue State" snobs!

Flashback: The 2001 Leonid Meteor Shower

While sorting through some boxes of accumulated stuff from my days as a long-haul trucker, I came across this little memento from eight years back. It was scrawled in my nearly illegible scribble on the back of an envelope (that had contained the bills of lading for the shipping container full of fake Chinese christmas trees I had picked up the previous day at the Port of Los Angeles and was currently hauling to the K-Mart Distribution Center outside of Denver). I don't know who my intended audience was; I suspect they never saw it. So after a significant delay, y'all get first crack at it (transcribed as is, unedited).

For background; the return of the Leonid Meteor storms around the turn of the millenium had been eagerly anticipated for decades. It had been on my must-see list of upcoming astronomical events since I was a child. Astronomers had nailed down 2001 as one of the likely years for this to happen, and November 18th was the night. The outbursts in the previous few years had been poorly situated for North Americans; this one was expected to especially favor us.

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Late November 2001, on the road somewhere in the Western U.S.

Among the many hats I wear are those of the professional trucker and amateur astronomer. For the last week I kept a close eye on meteor forecasts and load assignments to try to get myself parked in clear, dark skies on the night of Nov. 18. All came together and I was in the desert in Utah under clear skies with a magnitude 6 visual limit. The only sky glow, mysteriously hanging under Leo, proved to be the Zodiacal Light. When my alarm got me up at midnight, I walked away from the stray lights of the highway and found the sickle of Leo just rising. Almost immediately, a shining yellow Leonid streaked across the sky from east to west, nearly from horizon to horizon. Over the next few minutes three more appeared low in the east, two creeping along the horizon and a third launching vertically like a rocket. This was the confirmation I needed; I returned to my truck, bundled up, and went back to settle in for the show.

By 1:00 I had counted 25 Leonids including those first four; quite an impressive tally, I thought, with the radiant only a few degrees above the horizon. In the next half hour I counted 33 Leonids; between 1:30 and 2:00 a total of 75 of them flashed into view. I put an exclamation mark beside that total in my notes, having never counted that many meteors in a half hour before. But the Leonids were just warming up.

I count meteors the simple, old-fashioned way. I just keep a tally in my head, and every 30 minutes write the number down, to enjoy the show without having to be fumbling with notepads and clocks and lights constantly. But before long I found myself having to use my fingers to keep track of how many hundreds of Leonids I had seen in each half hour. The numbers climbed exponentially: 141, 223, then 546! It might not have been of the magnitude of the colossal Leonid storms of earlier decades, but I knew I was seeing something that I would probably never see again.

At the peak of the display the sky reminded me of a forest filled with lightning bugs, flashing and winking out in ones, twos, and threes. I could just gaze at the radiant, which was quite well up by then, and see meteors flashing every few seconds all around. Along with the classic fast-flying yellow Leonids with trails lingering for a second or two, there were quite a few faint streaks that could have been easily overlooked if there had not been so many of them. The abundance of Leonids made the radiating pattern obvious, and the occasional sporadic meteors seemed almost comically lost, like someone trying to go up the down escalator.

It is hard to say if it was real or just an illusion created by random scattering, but the Leonids certainly did appear to be clustered. Pairs and threesomes seemed to come in rapid succession; at one point five Leonids flashed in one second, giving a brief hint of what the intense storms might look like. Whether there is any real definition of a "meteor storm" I do not know, but I would tend to think of this display as a heavy shpwer, not a full-on storm. The meteors were easily countable, they were not constantly filling the sky, and they did not create the feeling of "racing through space towards the radiant." These all feature prominently in the eye-witness accounts of historical Leonid storms. Whatever it is called, it was a sight to remember!

Leonids kept falling at about 1000 per hour from about 3:00 until 4:00. After that they tapered off only slowly; bright meteors were still visible several times per minute at the end of the night in the dawn twilight. It seemed to me that notable fireballs were notably lacking for the first half of the show; after 3:30 brilliant white fireballs with terminal bursts and trails that persisted for several minutes became common. At about 4:40 when the shower had dwindled to "only" 500 meteors per hour, fatigue and cold won out and I returned to the sleeper of my truck. Even then it was hard to leave the continuing rain of shooting stars outside my windshield, and I kept peeking every half hour or so until dawn finally brought the show to an end.

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As a postscript, I in fact did see a second Leonid outburst the following year from my newly-acquired farm in Tennessee, which was almost as impressive as the 2001 show.

Video Success and Failure

As promised a week or so ago, more comments about the recent Pearl River video and video in general...

To begin, an important question: Why did so many people, including some who had been quite skeptical of previous Ivorybill evidence, initially get such a pro-Ivorybill impression from Mike Collin's 11/5 video? I think several factors contributed to this. First, when the bird initially appears, it is flying towards the camera. This created a predictable foreshortening of the wings, making them appear narrower than they really are. This is straightforward enough; however, the wings also appeared pointed. This almost kite-like impression in these initial frames colored perception of everything that followed. Secondly, two related phenomena interacted to prevent most from even considering a Red-headed Woodpecker when they first watched the video. Though it was not explicitly stated, I think we generally assumed that the bird had been seen, not just videotaped. and was known to be a large bird. I believe we made an assumption that the video would not even have been circulated if this fact was not known; an unjustifiable assumption, of course. I don't think this assumption was made explicitly or likely even consciously; but it lurked there. This was compounded by the fact that the published and distributed video was a deinterlaced 60 fps video which plays at half speed on most media players. This fact was not stated when the video was first made available; I had to ask to get this piece of information through a couple of links of communication. Of course, this was not done with the intent of deceiving or misrepresenting; it was done to make the video clearer and easier to analyze. Nevertheless, most viewers' first viewing of this clip was at half speed, without their being aware of this, which caused the bird to appear larger with slower movements. If you take the clip and play it at double speed (i.e. true speed), the bird suddenly looks much smaller and far less Ivorybillish. These things combined very quickly -- long pointed wings, assumption of large bird consistent with its apparent flight style -- to put most viewers in a mental state where Red-headed Woodpecker did not even come to mind as an option. Once this impression is in the mind, you become much more forgiving of the things that appear later in the video that might point in other directions.

The lesson from this: Never make any judgement about a video such as this until you have full information about the circumstances of the encounter, what was seen in addition to what is on the tape, and all the possibly relevant technical aspects of the clip. This is in fact why I have never had anything to say about Mike's "fly-under video" from 2008; without having access to the full clip, rather than just selected segments, I feel that I have no context to judge what I might be seeing.

My second point is much more general. Birders do not seem to have figured out yet what to do with video. A video tends to be treated just as a big heap of poor-quality still images. There is a very strong tendency to pick out individual frames in isolation and just interpret what is and is not seen in them. This approach makes use of the worst parts of a video (the image resolution, or lack thereof, combined with numerous artifacts) and discards some of its most useful parts: the documentation of movement, structure, and dynamics. I've gone on at length in the past about the astonishing failures of big-name birders in misinterpreting and misunderstanding imaging artifacts in low-quality video frames; now I'd like to talk about this second aspect.

Some birders tend to speak of the "giss" of a bird as though it is a metaphysical, supernatural property; perhaps an aura that can only be sensed, not measured. This is of course ridiculous. True, "giss" is a "gestalt" phenomenon; indeed before the British term was popularized in this country in the mid 1980s, we in America called it "gestalt birding" not "giss birding." But, it is a gestalt that arises from the physical nature and behavior of the bird. The giss of a bird in flight is created by its physical structure and the dynamics and patterns of its movements. There is nothing mystically incomprehensible about it. All of these attributes such as "wingtip elevation," "wrist angulation," "flap rate," "bound duration," etc. are in fact components of gizz, crystalized and quantified. If you see a "gizz" difference between two videos, you should be able to quantify what is creating it and use this for real, scientific, non-mysterious comparisons to other videos. You can also pick up other consistent, taxon-specific attributes that might not be obvious to the naked eye, such as apparent wingtip shapes, the geometry of the wings on the upstroke, etc. This is the additional information that is available in a video that compensates for the generally lower image resolution. Failing to take advantage of this is a very bad idea. Videos should be examined as a whole, with each frame in context of the temporal sequence, and the added dimensions of time and kinetics used to their full advantage.

As a side note here, many people have mentioned that flight style is a "soft" character, subject to variation. Of course, this is true. But it is subject to variation only within limits. Birds don't learn how to flap fro scratch; that behavior is hard wired. Each species has a set range of flight styles that it can vary within. One will never find a Pileated Woodpecker flying like a Ruby-throated Hummingbird no matter how hard one might look. So, of course if you only have two examples to compare, there's little you can say. But if you have a large suite of comparison material you will get a much better sense of what the range of this "soft" character is, and can in fact determine if an unknown bird is within or outside of this range.

Finally, a point that was illustrated well by this recent video. When you do have the species identification correct, and you have suitable comparison material, you will see everything about the video in question fall in line behind this ID in short order. Allowing for minor glitches and transient illusions, every frame and every feature will be seen to be readily explained by and consistent with the hypothesis that the bird in the video is actually of species X. Once I had a suitable Red-headed Woodpecker video, the recent Pearl video immediately lined up with it so well (frame by frame and in its totallity) that it was clear there was little more to discuss.

It is interesting to note that this has never happened with the Luneau video and attempts to line it up with a Pileated. Only by misinterpreting image artifacts, ignoring flight style and wing dynamics, and focusing on select out-of-context frames can one even begin to line them up. Still, five years later, no one has yet produced a video of a Pileated in flight that even approximately matches the bowed-winged downstrokes of the Luneau bird. It took me one trip to the woods and 30 minutes to get a Red-headed Woodpecker video that was an exact match to the recent Pearl video, in plumage, structure, and movement. The contrast between these two experiences is informative.