'Extinct' Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Found

LMAO!!!!

This worked for them on the grade school play ground as they were stealing money from the smaller kids.... ;)

I wonder why it doesn't work here??? :)

Come on boy's, you need to come up with some thing a little more adult, then you could possibly have relevance... ;)

"SIGH"...... keep it up, you just make me look good... :eek: :)
 
Back to the topic: Did anyone see who owns the land the wood pecker was discovered on?

The Nature Conservancy does.

Nemont
 
Nemont, Isn't this amazing? Especially the part about the secret buy up while the search was going on?

"The secrecy was in part to protect the bird while
documentation was gathered and management plans were being crafted,
and in part to give TNC time to buy up land to further safeguard the
ivorybill. In that short time, the conservancy spent more than $10
million on land acquisition in the Big Woods.

The area in question is in the Mississippi delta, forming a
corridor of swamp forest 15 miles wide and 130 miles long -- big,
deep, and difficult to penetrate except by canoe (and even then,
you'd better know how to use a GPS). Over the past 20 years, TNC and
others have protected more than 120,000 acres there, bringing to more
than half a million acres land that's in conservation protection,
largely within the two national wildlife refuges and state wildlife
land. It's been a largely unknown conservation success story, and
this news is an incredible validation of that work. TNC has plans to
buy and restore an additional 200,000 acres of bottomland hardwood
forest there, including land that was cleared for soybeans in the
'70s and '80s and will be reforested. Things should only get better
for the ivorybill. In fact, things have probably been getting
steadily better for decades, as the once-cut forests of the South
have recovered........."
 
The nature conservancy is probably the only organization with the money and agility to act that quickly. I was reading that much of the forested areas they are saving is classic Arkansas flooded timber that ducks use as wintering habitat and that the duck population will be boosted by the protection this area gets from the NC.

Nemont
 

From AP News:

The peer-reviewed research in the journal Ecology and Evolution comes from a group that’s spent more than a decade searching for the woodpeckers at an undisclosed site.

It includes drone video from as recently as October that shows a pair of birds with black-and-white coloring on the wings that researchers say helps distinguish them as ivory-billed woodpeckers.

“The last time a pair of birds was photographed would have been in the 1930s, so it’s really extraordinary on that level,” said Mark Michaels with Project Principalis, which sponsored the work and said it was being shared with federal wildlife officials.

The researchers also collected audio recordings of the woodpeckers and most of the search team had some kind of direct encounter, either seeing or hearing them, said Michaels and lead study author Steven Latta with the independent National Aviary in Pittsburgh.

An ivory-billed woodpecker would seem hard to miss with a 30-inch (76-centimeter) wingspan and a call reminiscent of a bulb bicycle horn. However, the bird’s preferred habitat is dense woodlands that can be hard for people to navigate. Many of those areas were logged early last century and the most recent agreed-upon sighting was in 1944.

There have been multiple reported sightings over decades. None fully resolved doubt, and federal officials said in 2021 there was “no objective evidence” of the bird’s continued existence.

After Project Principalis released early results of its work last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delayed the pending extinction declaration so it could take more public comment.


Federal officials want photos or videos all experts can agree on. Wildlife service spokesperson Christine Schuldheisz said the agency would “receive information on any species at any time.”

One of the study’s co-authors works at the wildlife service. A disclaimer said the research does not necessarily represent the agency’s views.

Millions of dollars have been spent on prior search efforts.

Cornell University Professor John Fitzpatrick, who was involved in a years-long search launched two decades ago in Arkansas, said the latest videos and photos when added to prior sightings provide sufficient cause to drop the extinction proposal.

“The region they are working in is highly likely to be able support ivory-billed,” he said.

Michael Collins, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, said the videos show the similar but smaller pileated woodpecker, not the ivory-billed. Collins has published numerous papers on ivory-billed woodpeckers and claims to have seen them himself last decade in the Pearl River area along the Louisiana-Mississippi border.

In the new drone video showing a pair of birds, Collins said glare from the sun catches on their wings, causing them to look white.

“All of the flight characteristics are consistent with pileated woodpeckers but not ivory-billed woodpeckers,” Collins said. “This video shows a pileated woodpecker.”

Another ivory-billed expert, Geoffrey Hill from Auburn University, said Thursday’s study offers a “compelling set of evidence” that ivory-billed woodpeckers persist. But Hill acknowledged it was unlikely to settle the debate.

“People have made up their minds. Unless they get smacked in the face with a dead bird or see it on an IMAX movie, they aren’t going to change their minds,” he said.
 
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