Elusive ivory-billed woodpecker not extinct, researchers say | Hacker News Reader

Elusive ivory-billed woodpecker not extinct, researchers say

theguardian.com

24 pointswglb7 comments

Sadly, the evidence does not justify the hype.

The age of everybody carrying billions of megapixels devices. People can't avoid being videotaped twenty times when buying bread, and all that we have to justify their grant is a blurred saucer hanging from a fish line.

Sure, cameras in todays smartphones are great and take beautiful pictures, but bird photography is pretty much their achille's heel - tiny fast-moving objects would require much better zooms, higher iso, and lower shutter lag than what's currently available with smartphones.

A professional researcher should have a decent real camera at least. Trap cameras will register everything of that size in the area and can be set to register non stop for six months, so the excuse of "birds are afraid of us and fly" is not really solid.

Some cheap trap cameras are just too shitty to be useful. They just need to keep trying. But not a single good photo still, after decades of people trying to find it, carries a strong suspicion of extinction.

> Comparison of photographs taken of apparent ivory-billed woodpeckers in Louisiana from this study (A, D), with a colorized ivory-billed woodpecker, also from Louisiana (B), and a pale-billed woodpecker taken in Central America (C). Photograph: The Guardian

I've found that boosting the exposure on cameras is a good way to capture detail on birds, branches, and other dark objects, at the expense of clipping skies to pure white. I think it usually doesn't cause birds to become overexposed, though I haven't done much bird photography recently.

My all time favorite piece from NPR is a story about sightings of “The Lord God Bird” near Brinkley, Arkansas back in 2005. It interleaves interviews from residents about their community with a song by Sufjan Stevens made for the piece. It is quite beautiful.

https://www.npr.org/2005/07/06/4721675/brinkley-ark-embraces...

Birder here, who's somewhat plugged in to this. Essentially nobody of any repute that I've come across believes there's any merit to these claims (sadly).

I want to believe.

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