Ivory-billed woodpecker - the movie

 Clayton Burns has sent the following after my last post about the lost woodpecker of Louisiana whose bodies I once saw laid out in such numbers in a laboratory desk drawer. 

"There’s an entity that I dearly wish existed, for its presence would bring me solace and wonder.  Alas, it’s elusive.  There are rumors that it is actually present in the world, but, sadly, these never pass empirical scrutiny.  A few people have had personal experience of this being, but these haven’t confirmed by others.  Much as I would like to live in a world inhabited by this being, I must reluctantly conclude that it doesn’t seem to exist.

I am an a-woodpeckerist.

About five years ago, biologists were all abuzz with a sighting and a brief and fuzzy video clip suggesting that the Ivory-billed woodpecker was still alive in the Arkansas swamps.  There were later sightings from Florida.  This was dramatic news, since the Ivory-bill (Campephilus principalis), America’s largest woodpecker, was thought to have been extinct since the mid-1940s.  The “resurrection” of an extinct and iconic species gave all biologists and bird lovers a new spring in their step.  How magnificent it would be to see this bird again after 60 years!

But intensive searching by biologists and laypeople over the past five years has failed to turn up the Ivorybill, and I sadly conclude that it’s really truly extinct. If there were an unambiguous sighting, with good video, I would of course change my mind, but for now the species is an ex-woodpecker, singing in the choir invisible.

As PLos Biology reports this week, a new movie on the search for the Ivorybill, Ghost Bird, opens in September.  The movie is reviewed by Jerome Jackson, an ecologist at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  It’s a nice review that summarizes all the brouhaha around the “rediscovery” of the woodpecker, somewhat resembling the hype about the “ancestral primate” Darwinius.  Although Jackson once thought the Ivory-bill was still alive, he’s now a skeptic.  He gives the movie an emphatic thumbs-up.

Ghost Bird reveals this process and the myriad of impacts it can have.
It is a film that will produce a more sophisticated citizen with a better understanding of how science works. While in many ways it is a fun film, a fascinating window on science and the interfaces of science, media, and the general public, ultimately, it tells the story of the tragic extinction of an iconic species and our collective and probably unfounded, yet seemingly inextinguishable hope that maybe, it might still exist. Science can prove that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker still flies. It cannot prove that it does not. With the efforts that have been made since 2004, it has become increasingly likely that it is extinct. But… the truth is still out there.

Sort of like God, isn’t it?

Ghost Bird will be publicly screened in 20 American cities, but only for a short time.  You can find the showings at the movie’s website."

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

The post is from an American evolution blog. "Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago... He is a frequent contributor to... The Times Literary Supplement...".

The blog is called "Why Evolution is True." Here is the post: "An elusive being August 18, 2010 – 7:00 am."

Every once in a while I think that I will do an inventory of American blogs in biology, biological anthropology, and evolution. Some quite good.

However, I am now researching the case of Marc Hauser at Harvard by reading his "Moral Minds" and following the coverage in "Nature," "The Boston Globe," "The New York Times," and "The Harvard Crimson."

It seems that an essential text in the analysis of fraud or misconduct in research is "On Fact and Fraud," by David Goodstein, Princeton University Press, 2010.

[Clayton Burns]

This seems to have been posted at The Harvard Crimson. The film will be too exquisite for words. Thanks for putting me onto this, Sir Peter:

All is not lost, Grasslandhero911, for Marc Hauser is that rare person capable of leading the search for the much loved and much missed:

Wikipedia: "Despite these high-profile reports from Arkansas, Florida, and sporadic reports elsewhere in the historic range of the species since the 1940s, there is no conclusive evidence for the continued existence of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker; i.e., there are no unambiguous photographs, videos, specimens, or DNA samples from feathers or feces of the Ivory-billed."

In a somber scene in Ghost Bird, workers at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology close drawer after drawer of Ivory-billed Woodpecker specimens, still and lifeless, evoking the chilling finality of extinction. (Image: Damir Frkovic © 2009/Small Change Productions).doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000459.g002

The devotee Sir Peter Stothard is more than eager to see the film "Ghost Bird," and will be the first repository of Marc's research results. A little bit of doctoring will do no harm. In the New Harvard Era, Fact and Fiction have changed places.

If they force me to write the Monkey SAT, I'm going to eat a devil's claw.

[Kyle T. Watch]

I will surely watch this movie.