14 DAY TRIAL // The spotting of a bird belonging to a very rare species is truly a major event for any biologist. But what happens when that particular event is perhaps not entirely true, or when the proofs documenting it are not sufficient?
That's exactly the case now, as three biologists are questioning the evidence used by a team of bird experts who made the electrifying claim in April that they had sighted an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird presumed to have vanished from the United States more than 60 years ago, in the swampy forests of southeast Arkansas, as reported by The New York Times.
If the challenge holds up, it would undermine not only a scientific triumph - the rediscovery of a resplendent bird that had been exhaustively sought for years - but also significant new conservation expenditures in the region.
The paper questioning the discovery has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, which could post the analysis online within a few weeks. But the paper will be accompanied by a fierce rebuttal by the team that announced the discovery, and a response to that rebuttal by the challengers.
The expected publication of the paper and the rebuttal was confirmed in interviews and e-mail exchanges with two authors of the challenge, Richard O. Prum and Mark B. Robbins, ornithologists at Yale and the University of Kansas, as well as with two members of the team that reported finding the woodpecker.
The third author of the new paper is Jerome A. Jackson, a zoologist at Florida Gulf Coast University and the author of the book, "In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker," published in 2004.
Both groups of scientists declined to name the journal or to discuss the details of the challenge and the response until they were published.
But they made it clear that the debate revolves around four seconds of fuzzy videotape that, by chance, captured a bird with sweeping white-and-black wings as it darted from its perch on the far side of a tupelo tree in April 2004 and flicked over swampy waters before vanishing in the trees 11 wing beats later.
That video clip was just one piece in a pile of drawings, recordings and other evidence collected in more than a year of searching and deploying cameras and listening devices across the vast swampy reaches of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge.
Altogether, the original research team, led by scientists from Cornell University and the Nature Conservancy, compiled seven sightings, including the video, as well as recordings of a "double knock" sound typical of the ivory-billed bird.
The Bush administration used the reported sightings in Arkansas to promote its "cooperative conservation" philosophy. The day the rediscovery was publicized, the administration announced a variety of initiatives, including a plan to pay more than $13 million to landowners within the region's floodplains who plant and maintain forests.
For the whole article, please visit the source, New York Times' website.