May 02 2011
Hunting the Elusive…
The existence of this creature remains at best controversial, with the bulk of the scientific community skeptical. The evidence so far put forward consists of photos and video that are either out-of-focus or at such a distance that definitive identification is not possible. Proponents focus on questionable analysis of minute details of their blurry videos in order to make their case, and excuse the lack of better evidence by that fact that their quarry is rare, wary, and lives only in the deep wilderness.
I am talking, of course, about the ivory-billed woodpecker.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is a larger cousin to the extant pileated woodpecker, but it was believed to have gone extinct in the 1940s. However, recent putative sightings have raised the possibility that a small population still persists in the deep swamps where they roam. In most of the videos and photographs shown so far the subject does appear to be a large woodpecker – but the question remains if the birds seen in these images are a pileated woodpecker or an ivory-billed. There are differences in markings and flying characteristics, but the fleeting and distant images do not allow for a clean distinction.
Birders are Skeptics
I became involved in a little bit of amateur birding over the last decade, as a fun project to do with my daughters. One thing that struck me when talking with more experienced birders is that there is a natural skepticism that pervades the birding culture. This makes sense, as the primary activity of birders is to identify these mostly-small animals in the wild based upon anecdotal evidence – people’s reports of what they heard and saw. There are also many birds that are easy to confuse with similar related birds, and it takes a practiced eye and ear often to distinguish them.
Further, birders keep track of what birds they have seen, and share their stories of rare bird sightings with pride. The so-called “life list” of birds seen is based on the honor system. So it is not surprising that a culture of skepticism has evolved among birders. It’s partly a way to educate each other, and for more experienced birders to school their greener companions. They exchange the best “field markings”, which are features that can easily be viewed in the field that are most helpful in identifying specific bird species. And of course, there is at times friendly but vigorous discussion about what kind and quality of evidence is necessary before concluding that a specific bird was sighted. The birding culture is complete with the recognition of how easy it is to be deceived by your eyes, of the effect of viewing conditions on the ability to identify field markings, and the effects of bias in wanting to add a rare bird to one’s life list.
There is also a willingness to be skeptical of the claims of others – no false politeness. When I was just getting started in birding I set a couple of bird feeders outside my kitchen window. For a while most of the birds that were coming to the feeder were new to me (since I knew so little about the local bird species). This further meant that I had no idea how common or rare a bird was when I first saw it. One morning just as I woke up I saw about five birds all of the same species that I had not seen before. They looked like blue-jays, but were not blue-jays (a species with which I was already very familiar). They were darker and lacked any white markings. I observed them at close range for a few minutes. I didn’t run to get my camera because it did not occur to me that they were rare – I figured I would be seeing them often at my feeder. And typically birds would have left by the time I got my camera ready, so I chose to spend the time observing them. This is a decision I would soon regret.
I then went to my trusty bird encyclopedia to find out which species I had just observed. After about an hour of pouring through the book I came to the conclusion that the birds must have been Steller’s jays – a species related to the blue jay. There was just one problem – Steller’s jay are native to the West coast of the US, not the East cost. But – they are occasionally seen as “accidentals” – as birds found outside of their native range. Sometimes they hitch a ride on a transcontinental jet, for example. I further concluded that I had seen an adult with their children, likely hybrids with a local blue jay.
The first time I told a more experienced birder that I saw five Steller’s jays near my home in Connecticut, without hesitation she looked at me and said, “No, you didn’t.” She applied a little bit of Occam’s razor and concluded that it is much more likely that an inexperience new birder simply was mistaken about what he thought he saw than that he had an extremely rare (if not impossible) encounter with an accidental. I thought back to my decision to observe the birds rather than run for my camera and realized it was the wrong decision.
The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
It is within this community of natural skeptics that claims of an even more unlikely bird sighting are being made – a species, rare and elusive when alive, and thought to be extinct for decades. The evidence coming forward is intriguing, but not compelling. Ornithologists have largely concluded that the photos and videos are of pileated woodpeckers, but believers do have some interesting details to point to that might suggest the ivory-billed is still around.
Now an amateur bird-hunter is throwing his evidence into the ring. Michael D Collins has produced a series of videos with audio that he claims is of a woodpecker too large and fast to be a pileated – and therefore the only other contender is the ivory-billed. He has spent the last year waiting in the swamps for the chance to glance this bird, and claims he has had ten sightings.
The problem is that his evidence is less than definitive. The video is generally out-of-focus or distant. He has done some careful analysis of the video to estimate size and speed, but such analyses are notoriously subject to bias. We have seen similar “detailed analyses” of Bigfoot photos, or UFO photos, looking at the tiny details that might suggest some feature which in turn would suggest that the subject is really a large primate or spaceship. Such exercises turn out to be little more than exercises in self-deception and confirmation bias. And they are no substitute for one high-quality photo or video.
My advice to Mr. Collins is to invest in a better camera and to learn how to use it. Now, I am all too familiar with how difficult it is to take photos or video of birds. Even large birds are still small creatures, that move fast and generally do not stay still for the camera. They are also skittish and don’t allow you to get very close. The solution, however, is the telephoto lens and a tripod.
It’s possible that there is a reason all of the photos and video of putative ivory-billed woodpeckers are blurry – because all the close and in-focus pictures can be clearly identified as not being an ivory-billed.
Collins himself is convinced he has seen the ivory-billed. He is quoted as saying:
“All these politics are very damaging. We should be saying, ‘OK, the bird exists, it’s just very difficult to observe. Now where are they? Where do they live? How can we save them?”
Sorry – wrong. It is premature to conclude that the bird exists, and to engage in “special pleading” that the low-quality evidence is due to the bird being difficult to observe. The alternate, and default, explanation is that it is impossible to observe, because it’s extinct. We need definitive evidence before we can conclude it still survives.
The plausibility here, however, is low but not extreme. We are not talking Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. The quest for the ivory-billed is perhaps more analogous to the coelocanth – a fish thought to be extinct until it was found in a fish market. I am willing to believe that the ivory-billed is still out there, clinging to survival. I hope it is, and I hope I get to see an unambiguous picture or video or one some day.
But until then it is best to remain skeptical, and not to jump to premature conclusions based upon ambiguous evidence.
And for the record – I did see Steller’s jays in my backyard in Connecticut (OK – at least I think I did, but I could be wrong). But even if I did, I would not expect anyone to believe me based upon my say so. I can only kick myself for being too inexperienced to even realize what I was looking at and to grab my camera. I still sit by the window sometimes looking at my bird feeder and hoping for another such rare encounter that will likely never come.
15 Responses to “Hunting the Elusive…”
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As a lifelong birder, I can sympathize with your having run into the credibility police with your “five Stellar’s Jays were at my Connecticut feeder” claim. (Note: It’s actually “Steller’s Jay”, with an “e”.) It certainly is an interesting question what it was you actually saw. But like the experienced birder who confidently told you, “No you didn’t”, I can, with a fairly high degree of confidence, make the same assertion.
It is not impossible that five Steller’s Jays were at your feeder that morning. But it is “not impossible” in the same sense that it is not impossible that the Luneau video shows an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, or that thylacines survive in Tasmania. It might even be shading into the realm of not impossible in the sense that a plesiosaur might inhabit Loch Ness, or an unknown-to-science furry hominid might inhabit the Pacific Northwest. Mathematically possible? Yes. Plausible? Not so much.
It’s not just that you think you saw a Steller’s Jay in Connecticut. It’s that you think you saw five Steller’s Jays in Connecticut. You seem to recognize how much unlikelier that is than a single sighting, but your speculation as to how that might have come about (a single accidental with its locally bred hybrid offspring) applies an additional huge degree of unlikeliness. Not just for the rarity of the two species hybridizing, but for the associated requirement that it be necessary that a Steller’s Jay made it to Connecticut without being identified by any other of the many hundreds (thousands?) of birders who would have instantly recognized and reported it, and then remained there long enough to successfully breed and raise a brood to adulthood, again, without every being identified by anyone else.
Steller’s Jays are not shy, retiring Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. They are bold, boisterous, noisy birds with loud and characteristic calls. If there had been even one Steller’s Jay in your neighborhood (much less five of them) for any length of time, there should have been dozens of reports from experienced birders. That there weren’t any is strong evidence against your having actually seen what you think you saw.
You don’t give a lot of detail in this piece, but presumably you had time to observe these birds closely. This is an area where your inexperience really counts against you: For an experienced birder familiar with both species, there is a long list of distinguishing features you would have been able to look for. For such an observer, a Steller’s Jay is not just a Blue Jay that happens to be darker. It is a specific thing in its own right, with a long list of defining characteristics. Were these birds noticeably larger than a Blue Jay? Did they have the black on the head, throat, and nape, extending the right distance? Did they have the light markings around the base of the beak? And again, the vocalizations: Did you hear these birds? Blue Jays and Steller’s Jays make very different, and very readily distinguishable, sounds, and they do so pretty much all the time. What did these birds sound like?
The mechanism whereby an inexperienced (or experienced, for that matter) bird watcher arrives at an erroneous ID is an interesting one. That someone like you, an expert on how the human mind tricks itself, is willing to engage in the same thing, is a poignant example of how powerful these forces are.
It is overwhelmingly likely that an inexperienced birdwatcher making an extraordinary claim like this is simply mistaken. But there still remains the question: What did you actually see? Knowing just the tiny bit I know from your post, I would rank the possibilities in this order, from most to least likely:
* You saw a different species, normal for your area, and your inexperience led you to misidentify it. Maybe you were incorrect about their being jays, but otherwise close on general size and shape: So, maybe they were American Robins? Or European Starlings? Or maybe you were led astray by the novice’s tendency to focus on one key characteristic (the crest?), and then shoehorn other features into compliance with the desired ID. Cedar Waxwing, maybe? If I had to bet, that’s the one I’d put my money on.
* You saw ordinary Blue Jays. Some trick of the early-morning light, or of your just-out-of-bed bleary-eyed vision, conspired (along with your inexperience at observing and identifying birds) to convince you they were darker than normal.
* You saw ordinary Blue Jays in disguise: Some unknown factor (they got into oil somehow?) led to them being darkened.
* You saw melanistic Blue Jays: Some genetic anomaly rendered them darker than usual. For there to be five of them all at once seems extremely unlikely, but as with your Steller’s Jay/Blue Jay hybrid speculation, I guess we can posit a family group to help out here.
We’ll probably never know. But again, it’s interesting to me that you persist in thinking you saw five Steller’s Jays, even in the face of experts telling you otherwise.
@jbc-Nice post! Thanks for the informed skeptical take.I think you are actually re-enforcing Steve’s point of writing this piece.
The birding community is a naturally skeptical community. It would be interesting to do some studies on organizations that develop an organic sort of skepticism. Perhaps there are some insights in how they are structured that will help us create more natural skepticism in our society as a whole.
1) it’s Dr. Collins, not Mr. Collins… and you may call him an “amateur bird hunter” but he is easily experienced enough to recognize an Ivory-billed Woodpecker should he encountered one close-up; and he has adequate cameras as well.
2) Second, Mike’s evidence is not new, but has been in circulation for a long time now… simply picked up recently by a variety of naive “science” sites suddenly making it appear new.
3) as far as “premature” conclusions go, they are rampant throughout the life sciences. Virtually any medical or biological journal article you can point to will include premature conclusions if they even dare list any solid conclusions at all.
3) Having said all that (and though I think it possible Mike has encountered Ivory-bills in the Pearl at one time or another), the evidence he keeps pushing in different forms, simply isn’t at all conclusive (indeed I find it weak), and isn’t being taken very seriously in any birding circles I’m aware of.
4) And no, I don’t believe for a second that you saw Steller’s Jays at your Conn. home; indeed I believe the probability of Mike having seen Ivory-bills in the Pearl is far greater than your claim.
jbc – Thanks for writing – you are reflecting the very skeptical attitude I have found (and admired) among birders.
I don’t really maintain that I did see a Steller’s jay with her hybrid brood, as my parenthetical remark of doubt was meant to convey. I know now how unlikely that was. But I don’t rule it out as a possibility.
I do know this: – what I did see what about the same size and shape as a blue jay, but a darker blue without the typical white markings of a blue jay. They were very beautiful, actually.
I did not state it, but one bird was bigger than the others, which is what led me to believe it was a parent with their children.
I was very familiar with blue jays at the time, having grown up seeing them often and knowing how to identify them, and I really don’t think I would have been fooled by regular blue jays.
Possibilities:
– A family of blue jays with some mutation affecting their coloring. I have found this to be quite common, and I have identified many coloring variants at my feeder.
- Cedar waxwing fits the size and shape, and I have subsequently seen waxwings in my yard. But I really thought the birds were dark blue, and a waxwing does not fit my (now hopelessly flawed and biased) memory.
- A Steller’s jay with her hybrid brood. I would add that given that I saw them only once it is possible they were just passing through, which is why there were not other local sightings.
- Some other species (definitely not starlings or robins, though).
It is frustrating that I will now never know what I truly saw. And it is fun (in a way) for me to be in the position of the witness, facing knowledgable skeptics. It’s a useful experience.
cyberthrush – points 1-3 are irrelevant and defensive.
point 3b is the only one that is relevant, and is the basic point of my post.
Point 4 – see above. As I said, without any evidence I do not expect anyone to believe that I saw a Steller’s Jay in CT. It’s just a funny anecdote – and honestly at this point I don’t know what I saw.
I’m certainly not a birder but I have seen many a pileated woodpecker in the woods, on farms, and even pounding away on suburban telephone poles. They don’t seem particularly shy.
And when they are at work, they are LOUD. A very distinctive hammering. Wouldn’t an even larger woodpecker make even more noise?
Thanks for another enjoyable blog entry. I am an amateur birder as well, and I too have encountered a healthy skeptical attitude from most of the birders I have met. I had a couple of field jobs involving the identification of birds in my area, mainly grassland sparrows, which are notoriously difficult to identify. During a field trip in my ornithology class, the professor would sometimes jokingly lump a hard-to-identify sparrow into the “small brown bird” group.
Before my first field job after graduation, the grad student I worked for gave me a CD containing the bird calls of most of the species we would encounter. He would later quiz me on the calls, and knowing them was a life saver. He cared very much about getting it right, and about being honest and saying “I don’t know” when we simply could not make an identification. That summer job was one of the best experiences of my life. We would wake up in camp at ~5:00am, go down to the plots and use our birding skills to locate nests and identify species until the evening. We saw Baird’s Sparrows, Botteri’s Sparrows, Grasshopper Sparrows, and others in the tall grass, much of which was the non-native Lehmann Lovegrass (the main reason for that study).
My favorite bird sighting was probably the pair of Elegant Trogons I saw in the Chiricahua Mountains during a herpetology workshop. They were actually nesting high in a tree beside our campsite. They are well named.
tiberious:
We usually have the Northern Flicker woodpecker around here (where Steller’s Jays are not uncommon). During mating season the males hammer on the furnace vents. The metal makes a nice loud sound, especially in the house!
Dr. Novella, if you have an opportunity to go to a conference at the Univ. of Washington’s Medical School, you should take a short walk to the Union Bay Natural Area. Going another direction, close to a freeway, and by the Montlake Cut that joins two lakes is Arboretum and Foster Island.
Steve–you just earned 10 Skeptical Cool-points for raising the unreliability of unassisted memory! Knowing that confirmation bias and confabulation can adulterate even the most skeptical recollections is a powerful thing to admit.
That said, I don’t know much about birding but I think the other commenters have been unkind and not taken notice that you’re not claiming certainty here. I mean, to say that it’s more likely that an *extinct* species was sighted, rather than an *extant* species that got blown off course is rather unreasonable.
I also think that the argument about how these ostensible Jays could *never* have made the trip without being sighted by thousands of supposedly knowledgeable and vigilant birdwatchers is pretty ludicrous. It reminds me of the True Believers who scoff at skeptical explanations of miracle claims or UFO sightings, who insist that it could never be the explanation in the absence of X, Y and Z. It’s a special pleading argument.
Nice post, and timely too with all the spring migrations. I’ve been trying to do some birding myself these past couple years, but still have a lot to learn.
Do you participate in any extensive bird counting projects, like this one through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology?
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/page.aspx?pid=1664
Citizen Science projects like that have to rely on the honor code of all the participants at various skill levels. But I would think that just in getting more people involved, and having as many sets of eyes as possible observing bird populations, the mistakes and exaggerations would get diluted to negligible levels.
Any good beginner’s birding book recommendations? I can tell the difference between a pigeon and sparrow, but just barely. I’m in Northern California, just in case that makes a difference.
rokstatue,
Assuming you are in Eastern North America:
http://www.amazon.com/Sibley-Field-Guide-Eastern-America/dp/067945120X/ref=cm_lmf_tit_6_rsrsrs0
Oh, oops, reading comprehension not up to par just yet this morning:
http://www.sibleyguides.com/about/the-sibley-field-guide-to-birds-of-western-north-america/
I live 6km from the foot of the Dandenongs. Every Sunday, instead of attending church service as in my younger days, I religiously go for a walk in the Dandenongs and I never fail to see an Eastern Yellow Robin. But I have never seen one in my back yard.
If I ever do, I’m not going to believe my lying eyes!