Some old news

On the woodpecker front, cleaning up something from last year I missed...

In all the fun of 2007, I somehow managed not to catch that Mike Collins had posted a video he took in Florida early in that year. I quit checking his site quite a while ago after he made a habit of launching into surreal explosive diatribes against anyone who disagreed with any aspect of his reports (a list which rapidly came to include virtually everyone but himself). Anyway, Mike says this video shows one of the two birds he saw and identified as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Unfortunately, this video shows a Pileated Woodpecker. He sees a white underwing with suggestions of a dark stripe up the middle of the underwing. I see blur caused by motion, focus, and pixilation, which inevitably will make an elongated object against a bright background appear light around its perimeter and dark on a stripe up the middle. I base my ID of the bird on its flight. The bird shows full upward extension of the wing at the beginning of the downstroke, which is maintained all the way through to the bottom of the stroke. This is typical flight for a Pileated Woodpecker, and is unlike the flight of the bird in the Luneau video which never extended its wings fully upward or laterally in any of the visible wingbeats.

ADDENDUM: Mike dismisses my Ivorybill writings as "uninformed opinions from the sidelines." Funny, he used to actively seek out my "uninformed opinions" and even quote them in support of his own views, until the first time I disagreed with him on anything. He doesn't yet grasp that it is this behavior, more than anything else, that has completely undermined his credibility with most people involved in this discussion. But back to the evidence. Love it or hate it, the Luneau video is the only video or movie footage that substantial numbers of birders and ornithologists think might even possibly show an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in flight with any minimal clarity at all. It is also the only video of a North American large woodpecker that actually shows a flight style that is not obviously the same as typical Pileated flight. Mike's Pearl videos don't hardly resolve anything but vague flapping. The Choc videos don't clearly resolve flight style either, and aren't in fact undeniably even of woodpeckers. Hence, Luneau is the only empirical comparison material available. Mike's theoretical calculations about what flight styles should be, along with Louis Bevier's theoretical calculation about what wingbeat rates should be, are not real comparison standards. In Mike's Florida video, the flight style is clearly resolved. It matches actual Pileated videos closely; it does not match Luneau. Mike mentions wingbeat rate again, also. The significance of wingbeat rate per se in the first few flaps after takeoff has been show to be nil.