Saturday Cornell will be announcing the results of the winter 2005-2006 Ivory-billed Woodpecker search. According news stories, such as this one today, there won’t be much to say. However, I’ve heard that they have more “interesting” sounds (which I expect will take months to analyze) and about a half dozen more-or-less unsubstantiated sightings. I gather this is due to the fact that at least in some cases, they sent their volunteers into the swamps alone. Surely they could have found enough willing volunteers to make sure everybody had a partner? If there are people who don’t fully believe the likes of Tim Gallagher, do they really want one-person reports from nice Mrs. Betty Who? or Mr. Big Lister?
Anyway, I wouldn’t even bring up the tired subject of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker except that a friend asked me what I thought of the response of the Cornell team to Jerry Jackson’s commentary in the journal the Auk. Having replied to my friend in writing, I thought I may as well share the words with you. He asked what I thought of the letter. I thought, “Man, this has really degraded into petty nitpicking.” I thought that by and large, many of the points Cornell made were debatable, often a matter of perspective or even semantics. In fact, in parts it was a breathtaking example of the finest hairsplitting I’ve seen in some time.
For those of you late to the party, Jackson offered his (generally critical) opinion on the circumstances surrounding the reported rediscovery of the woodpecker and the subsequent publicity in the January 2006 issue of the Auk, which is the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The most recent issue contains a reply, written by most or all of the authors of the original paper on the rediscovery (hereafter just referred to as “Cornell” for the sake of brevity), which was published in April 2005 in the journal Science. Curiously, the title of the reply is “Clarifications about current research on the status of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas,” even though it is a rebuttal to a commentary.
Just one example of split hairs is the issue of funding. Jackson called it a “reallocation” of funds which resulted in funding not going to other endangered species. Cornell refuted this, saying that the funding came from “unallocated funds available for preventing extinctions, species recovery, law enforcement, and migratory bird management…”
If these funds had not gone to the woodpecker, would they not have gone to aid other real, living populations of other species? It is hard for me to believe that there is an $11 million chunk of money sitting in a federal budget that never gets used except in extraordinary circumstances such as the rediscovery of a species that has been presumed extinct. That’s just hard to swallow, and it seems to me that, like other points made in the letter, that Jackson is correct because the end result is the same, and Cornell is correct on a technicality. Tomatoe, tomatoh.
As for a debatable issue, Jackson thought the rapid path to publication of the Science paper compromised the peer review process. Cornell refutes that, saying the paper was reviewed under standard procedures, which included “requests by Science editors that reviewers act quickly.” This seems decidedly non-standard to me. For comparison, I looked at all the papers in the current issue of Science categorized as “Reports,” same as the woodpecker paper (there were 14). Average time from submission to acceptance was 11.7 weeks (shortest 6 weeks), versus 3 weeks for the woodpecker paper. Who really knows if being rushed via special request of the Science editor did not influence the care taken by the reviewers? Would they even admit it?
Cornell took pains to point out that Jackson’s piece was not peer-reviewed science, complaining that the media and Jackson portrayed it as such. Yet they then turned around and criticized him, and the editor of the Auk, more than once for not presenting data or analyses that support alternative interpretations of Cornell’s original evidence, for a lack of fact-checking, good science, and scholarly review!
This may sound like I am dumping on Cornell. In the letter, Cornell says they welcome objective review and criticism of their work. Jackson’s piece was a commentary, yet I thought Cornell’s response was just short of rude at times, with a sort of holier-than-thou feel to it. As a skeptic myself, I may have more sympathy for that point of view. But as I’ve said before, I have friends that are involved on both sides of this increasingly tall fence, and I don’t have a horse in this race myself, so I’m really not out to bust one group’s chops more than the other.
It’s all just twisted and, at this point, incredibly tedious. Worse, battle lines have been drawn between prominent and important ornithologists, research and conservation organizations, and a passionate public which has long been generous with both financial and volunteer support to protect the birds they love. This contentious atmosphere has gone beyond lively scientific debate, and cannot bode well for future bird conservation efforts. I don’t think this outcome could have been anticipated, and I can only hope it is not perpetuated. Somehow, though, I don’t see anybody going quietly into the night.
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Jackson's article, as I read it, made the argument that "Your (CLO's) evidence is flimsy, and that justifies my rebutting it with even flimsier evidence of why the bird can't be there." He managed, however, to omit a few reasons that did appear in his book – like the fact that his assessment that the IBWO was unlikely to be in the Big Woods area was based on a drive-around of a couple of hours duration.
And do we need to remind ourselves that opinion is not science?
That isn't to say that I believe. I don't know enough to believe or not believe. When I saw the de-interlaced, 4x, half speed video, the very first thought through my mind was "am I looking at the top of the wing or the underside of the wing?" I just don't have the nerve to ask questions like this, so I kept it to myself, thinking that only a really bad birder or an idiot wouldn't be able to figure out if that was the top of the wing or not.
I think the last paragraph of the American Bird Conservancy statement on the situation (the whole thing is probably too long to post here, but I'll forward it to you) says it all:
Conservation often requires working against the long odds of insufficient time, too little data, and meager funding, but waiting to act until perfect knowledge is achieved can mean acting too late. Those working on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker today are doing what should be done, and we at ABC fully support their activities. We in the bird conservation community cannot allow unfair criticism and unsubstantiated claims to adversely affect our conservation work. We encourage you to support the partners involved in Ivory-billed Woodpecker recovery, not blindly or without healthy skepticism, but with appreciation for the honesty and competence with which they are doing difficult work in the face of negative publicity.
Bottom line: yesterday's announcement brought me to tears.
I heard Gallagher give a talk at a birding festival last fall where I lead trips. The presentation was good, he was very personable, but for not making any more contact with the birds since, you gotta wonder. The one thing that really peaked my interest and still has me wondering is that Gallagher presented locations where double-taps consistent with Campephilus woodpeckers were recorded by the automated devices out there. Apparently (at least this is what I gathered at the time) all the noises were coming from two locations, and these were the locations where visual sightings had taken place… If that's true (it's easy to not get all the facts or draw the wrong conclusions), that a very interesting occurance. Not proof. Just a great reason to keep looking.
As you noted, the atmosphere is quickly turning into a cesspool. I think for the people that were involved in announcing the rediscovery, there's too much riding on the line to admit they might be wrong.
Time will tell. In the meantime, here's hoping that the animosity gets taken down a notch or two.
Early on, I was at an invitation-only presentation given by Lammertink. I, too, was really impressed and pretty convinced. But I'm no woodpecker, audio/video, or identification expert, so I was equally swayed by Sibley's paper and the points made by other people more experienced than I am. So, there are two plausible explanations for the evidence presented. Frankly, I don't know who is right, but the snarkiness is a real turn-off and past the point of being productive, I think.
When the "rediscovery" story first broke I wasn't all that surprised – there's a lot of habitat that doesn't get visited a lot so why shouldn't there be a remnant population there? But then the issues started being raised and questions were being asked. Its important that these questions are asked but they seem to have triggered a rather too heated debate.
This shouldn't be about who is right it should be about finding out the answer. The current debate isn't doing anyone a lot of good…and given the forces arrayed against good environmental science we could do without this as well.