The writer focuses on the inherent ambiguities of the sightings; he MAY even have seen one himself:
"The ivory-billed woodpecker is, essentially, Schrödinger's cat, the famous physics paradox in which a cat in a box is neither dead nor alive until you open the box. By keeping my mouth shut (about as rare an experience as an ivory-bill sighting), the bird is both extinct from the planet and nesting in the swamps of Arkansas.
"But this is not one of those crummy stories that ends with some annoying riff about "ambiguity." Birding is not philosophy. Birding is storytelling, and ivory-bill birding is the most exquisitely nuanced yarn of them all. It requires that you consider the different facets of the ivory-billed woodpecker from every angle. (My experience with Bill Tippit and this philosophical mumbo jumbo are but two.) There are, with some editing, 13 ways of looking at the ivory-billed woodpecker, and there is an answer to the burning question Did I see the damn bird or not? Here's the thing — I'm not able to give the answer. It's a birding story. Only you can."
RTWT, of course. Just two observations:
(1)Tim Gallagher continues to be a class act.
(2) The word is "transect", " To dissect transversely", or the noun deriving from that word; not "transept", used TWICE fer chrissake: "the transverse part of a cruciform church" [both OED]. Shouldn't a "senior writer" at the NYT or at least his editors know this?
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They are a long way from demonstrating that there is a breeding population, aren't they.
I keep thinking of Ed Wiseman's 1979 Colorado grizzly bear, killed in self-defense, and officially the "last" grizzly.
A last Arkansas ivory-bill would be a sad event.
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