critics convinced new audio provides proof of ivory-billed woodpeckers

The New York Times reports that Richard Prum and Mark Robbins, two of the authors of a paper challenging the identification of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers on a video made by a team from Cornell, now feel the species does exist, based on new audio recordings provided by Cornell. The challenge paper’s third author, Jerry Jackson, is out of the country and has not heard the audio.

The Cornell team is slated to present new audio evidence at the upcoming meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union; Cornell had 14,000 hours of recordings to analyze, a task that was not complete at the time they published their paper in Science.

I heard some of this evidence recently, and now that it is being reported in the media, I’ll mention what I heard and what else I was told existed. The audio evidence includes at least five recordings of the distinctive “kent” calls, including one recorded far from the original sightings, indicating at least one other bird. These were indistinguishable in sonograms from recordings made of IBWO in the 1930s by Allen and Tanner.

There are also about 80 recordings of double raps. These double raps are characteristic of woodpeckers in the genus Campephilus, and are vastly different from the rolling drum of the Pileated Woodpecker, which is in the genus Dryocopus. Most exciting was that one recording had a soft double-knock, followed by a closer, louder double-knock, perhaps a pair keeping in touch.

Prum and Robbins were offered the audio by Cornell yesterday, which included both “kent” calls and double-raps (including the pair mentioned above), and that they were “astounding” (Robbins) and “thrilling” (Prum). John Fitzpatrick, lead author of the Cornell Science paper, said he wished they’d sent Prum et al. the recording sooner. Indeed, if all the evidence had been provided to Prum & Co., perhaps the whole brouhaha would not have erupted in quite the way it did. I’ve heard two versions, both from primary sources: that Cornell offered better video to the challenge authors, but were not given enough time to provide it before the challenge paper was submitted; and that Cornell refused to provide better video when asked (remember, the challenge was based on the video evidence provided online in the supplementary materials to the Science paper).

Robbins said the challenge paper was a moot point; in a related article at Nature News, Prum said the manuscript has been withdrawn from the publication pipeline at PLoS Biology. (He also says he still thinks the video shows a Pileated Woodpecker.)

Perhaps I’ll be able to get further comment on how this all evolved. I was contacted by one of the challenge paper’s authors last week, who wanted to share with me some aspects of their side of the story. I expected to talk to him today, but now see why he was unable to make contact. Hopefully, I’ll still have the opportunity to bring you some news before I hit the road on vacation mid-week.