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Ivory-billed Woodpecker



C'Birders,
Today's NY Times contained a story entitled:
Faint Hope for Survival Of a Woodpecker Fades

It read, in part, as follows:
 
One more faint hope for the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker has
faded.
A team searching swampy Louisiana bottomland in January for the regal,
perhaps exinct bird, heard what they thought was a distinctive
double-rap on a dead tree. But researchers at the Cornell Lab of
Ornithology, who did a computer analysis of digital recordings of the
sounds, said yesterday that the listeners actually heard distant
gunshots.
John Fitzpatrick, head of the Cornell Lab, said in an interview that the
sounds were clearly gunshots. "The case is closed," he said," and nobody
wanted it to be an ivory-billed more than I did" 

The absence of evidence does not prove  an absence of birds, although
Dr. Fitzgerald said no calls were heard it means that no ivory-bills
were active in that area at the time of the recording. But he is not
giving up. He plans further searches in LA and other areas, as does the
Zeiss team.

Tom Joyce 
Brevard, NC