Exchanges with Chuck Hunter in a private Facebook group and in conversation inspired this addendum. If you haven’t read the original post, 2023 in Retrospect (Part 4): Acoustic Data in a Visual World, I encourage you to check it out first. Chuck’s comments led me to reconsider Tanner’s response to the Dennis recording, which resembles…
Introduction While I didn’t fully apprehend it at the time, the events that took place over several days in mid-March 2017 were singular. Crucially, the set of recordings made by Matt Courtman (formerly affiliated with Project Coyote) and Phil Vanbergen is unique in the history of ivorybill searches. Project Principalis’s paper included a discussion of…
This installment will focus the media response to and online discourse about our paper (both the preprint and the peer-reviewed version) and how the 2005 Arkansas controversy and its aftermath helped shape our paper’s reception. It will also examine the way the discourse has privileged visual material, especially video, at the expense of the totality….
Our peer-reviewed paper is available here. Update: The production error has apparently been corrected as of 1 pm on May 19. If you’ve read the paper already, be sure to clear your history to see the corrected version. First, a shoutout to my co-authors: Tommy Michot, Peggy Shrum, Patricia Johnson, Jay Tischendorf, Mike Weeks, John…
I’m personally indebted to David Martin (AKA Fangsheath). Not only was Dave a mentor during my early years as a searcher, Project Principalis would not exist without him. He was familiar with our study site and directed Frank Wiley to it as a promising place to search. Frank had a sighting soon thereafter. That sighting…
In light of a recent post on Facebook related to a sighting in Oklahoma and additional information provided to me privately, it seemed timely to post this on the blog. Further research may lead to some revisions and additional commentary. I’m grateful to Scott Roberson for his contributions to this piece. A related and in…
WWNO just ran a long story on our search effort. You can listen at the link (recommended) and/or read the text. I’ll share some thoughts about it below, but first a brief update. As April came to an end, Steve Latta, Jay Tischendorf, Tommy Michot, Phil Vanbergen, and I collected the AudioMoths that had been…
Wishing everyone happy holidays and the best for 2019. While the blog has been quiet for a couple of months, the effort continues. A number of items are in the works, and I hope to have news about them in the coming months. And of course, I hope to be able to report on new…
If you’ve been following this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) you know it has focused primarily on preconceptions about ivorybill range and habitat types and how the actual record paints a very different picture from what many of us think we know about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. As I noted in…
I intended this long-delayed installment in the “Bits and Pieces” series to be the year’s final post. I also intended it to the be final installment in the series. While this may end up as the last post for 2017, I’ve decided to cut this short and save some discussion for what I anticipate will…