Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  Had I declared that I had seen a panel of white, what might have happened? Would Harrison have then asked me: Was it on the trailing feathers? Well, maybe so. Was the bird large? Yes it was. Did it have a long neck? Yes, I think it did. And what if my editor, the day before, had told me that it would be a good story if I went out with Harrison but a cover story if I saw the bird with him? What if I knew that a confirmed sighting by a New York Times Magazine writer would land me on a half dozen prime-time news shows as the man who confirmed Cornell’s sightings after long absence? Maybe I’d get that interview with the secretary of the interior?

  Instead, I shrugged because I didn’t see anything I felt comfortable confirming. And then we paddled on. But the adrenaline moment was right there. Had I given in—I could feel the tug, too—had we talked it out, the sighting would have been as real as if I had seen something. In short order, it would have been another sighting, pillowed as they all were by powerful emotions so that, recollected in tranquility, the details could be recalled with absolute certainty. Such emotions cushion every sighting.

  The first sentence of Gallagher’s book reads, “I think I’ve always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which seem to involve birds.” This sentiment of deep longing grips all those from Cornell.

  “It’s been a fixation since early childhood,” Fitzpatrick told me. In many ways, Gallagher’s book can be read not as a birder’s adventure of discovery but as a fanatic’s confession of self-delusion.

  Gallagher admits he’s prone to “quixotic quests.” And in his own book, he notes that ivory-bill skeptics have long said things like “If you want to see an ivory-bill bad enough, a crow flying past with sunlight flashing on its wings can look pretty good.” The code name used for the bird during the Inventory Project was “Elvis.” As a Southerner, I immediately wondered if Cornell understood the joke. Elvis is, how you say, extinct. Only menopausal fans and postmodern ironists believe that bumper sticker: ELVIS LIVES.

  If you read Gallagher’s book closely, you see that he provides that pedigree of sightings that led to his own. He had heard about the location in Arkansas from Sparling, the kayaker. But Gallagher also tells the story of how Sparling came to kayak in the Bayou de View. It involves a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who told Sparling that she had seen an ivory-bill in the Big Woods of Arkansas the year before.

  Scott was a lawyer who in midlife abandoned her profession and decided to live in a yurt near her parents’ house in Long Beach, California. On one birding expedition, Scott took along a friend who knew a “woodpecker whisperer.” Mary called the clairvoyant on her cell phone from the swamp and learned that the bird wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group’s “energy.” Scott eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact, Scott sees the bird quite a lot when she’s alone, and she’s also never able to get her camera out of the backpack in time.

  “I must admit,” Gallagher nevertheless writes in his book, “I had come to believe strongly in her sighting.” And that’s the pedigree of the ivory-billed woodpecker sighting. Set aside the Department of the Interior, the Nature Conservancy, and Cornell University, and you have Harrison and Gallagher. Go back before them and you have the kayaker. Go back before him, following the chain of sightings, all linked by fervent ghost-chasers in a state of high emotion, and it leads back ultimately to a yurt-dwelling, courthouse dropout charting her course in the swamp with the help of a woodpecker whisperer on a cell phone.

  X. Blogging a Bird to Death

  Watching the massive rollout of IBWO 2.0 during the Bush administration was to see how much the methodology of the Massive Product Rollout has dominated the first decade of the millennium. Back in the summer before the Iraq invasion, some press members asked if war was imminent. Andrew Card, then chief of staff, famously noted, “From a marketing point of view, you do not introduce new products in August.” So we invaded the following March, a month whose very name seemed to synergize with the product (and/or service) being marketed.

  The Rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker was a product rollout that flooded the media pipelines and created a capital T Truth in the minds of the media and the public. So when it turned out that the new marketed truth was flawed, how could one push back against the Cornell publicity machine or the White House’s sycophantic press corps?

  As for the attempts by Prum and Robbins on the one hand and Sibley et al. on the other, all went to scholarly journals. They were banking on a system that may no longer function. They expected the scholarly journals to pronounce their findings and stamp upon them the imprimatur of authority.

  But as critics of the Bush administration discovered in the new media ecosystem, one cannot rely upon the media at large to spread any particular idea other than one issued officially from the high perch of authority. So if you don’t have a Cornell (or a White House) operation to flood the zone, it’s not easy to get the counter-story heard. The marketing plan dominates, the array of speakers stay “on message,” and the new truth continues to stand.

  The quaint notion of old-school truth—just the facts, ma’am—cannot really compete with a Massive Product Rollout. It took a while for the public and the media to understand this new shift. By the time Bush had a national emergency to drive his marketing, rational truth had become so small a part of our national discourse that the Bush administration could easily dismiss it as the idle pursuit of the liberal media. The old Enlightenment sense that truth is mutually arrived at through dialogue and debate had been reduced to a hat tip and a slogan. The President would often proclaim that we had had a debate to get us past the fact that the marketing plan intended to skip that part.

  The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had a chat about journalism and the Watergate story of Woodward and Bernstein that ended with this exchange:

  STEWART: The truth is the media couldn’t break Watergate today?

  COLBERT: That’s right, Jon, it just no longer has the credibility.

  STEWART: The media?

  COLBERT: No, the truth.

  The problem for the “truth” was made even more difficult for the skeptics confronting the massive IBWO 2.0 rollout. All Cornell had to do was take the discussion further and further into the academic weeds of mind-numbing specifics and stay on message. The slow pace of Enlightenment-style scholarship meant that it would take another six months to a year for the skeptics to write a formal reply.

  Pretty soon, the “debate” about the ivory-bill got very weedy. At one point, Cornell examined the blurred bird and determined that it beat its wings 8.7 times per second, which was what the historic tapes from the 1930s recorded for ivory-bills. Pileateds on the other hand averaged 7 to 7.5 beats per second. Now, in order for the academic system to rebut this claim, someone would have to step forward with a professional understanding of wing-beat theory, knowledge of how best to count wingbeats, an acquaintance with the problems of wingbeats on video, as well as the unique controversies of wingbeats on blurred video.

  Oy. It would take scholarship years to respond to these snooze-inducing details. In the flowering of all the new media in the new millennium, though, there appeared one that moved at precisely the opposite speed of a peer-reviewed journal, and it rode to the rescue. The blog. Specifically, Tom Nelson’s blog.

  Nelson was no expert. He’s an electronics engineer and a passionate birder with a healthy skepticism. His casual blog—tomnelson.blogspot.com—quickly became the gathering spot for all the amateurs in the larger sense—non-credentialed and credentialed birders who were outsiders to the Cornell clique.

  Reading this blog while also listening to Cornell’s occasional statements is to see how amateurism at its best confounds uptight pros. Granted, Cornell had been fighting rope-a-dope ever since Mark Robbins and Rick Prum complained. But the bloggers simply delighted in the fight, while Cornell had empires to lose. Journalism critics who don’t much care for blogs always complain how they are inf
ected with an infantile, sometimes potty-mouthed glee—snark. When you watch a real amateur assault on an academic and government fortress, it’s not hard to understand the pleasure. Cornell dug in and issued thin-lipped statements, while Nelson’s blog ruinously hooted at the “six-pixel bird.”

  Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to seeing anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know. On the other hand, once you introduce the prospect of getting a piece of the Department of the Interior’s $10 million ivory-bill habitat restoration fund (or a no-bid contract in Iraq), that becomes its own massive distortion field. The immediate prospect of money, power, or prestige obviously blurs one’s ability to discern the truth. And it makes it much easier to look into the fuzzy image of some de-interlaced pixels and see not only 8.7 wingbeats per second but also, as Gallagher wrote insanely in his book, “what appeared to be a large bird with a black-crested head and a white bill peering out from behind a tupelo.”

  What Sibley and his coauthors did with their observations about the bird in flight on the Luneau video, the Nelson blog did to every claim, every jot and tittle, regardless of how small or specialized. The rolling conversation of several years permitted every tiny aspect of the Cornell claim to get aired, challenged, defended, but—ultimately—debunked.

  No issue was so difficult that some reader couldn’t provide a challenge and show that Cornell’s evidence was far more slippery than it appeared. For instance, since Cornell apparently only saw one bird, how unlikely is it that that bird was an albino or a bird with abnormal pigmentation in the feathers, known as leucism? A common pileated with enough abnormal addition of white feathers would look, on the fly, very much like an ivory-bill. One amateur’s posting slays Cornell in a simple pithy line:

  what are the odds of an albino—remote—but they are more likely than a single unattended ibwo.

  What developed online was an amateur effort at peer review. In the arcane world of birding, this was not unlike the fight in the larger culture between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia—a fight between highly authoritative versus user-generated content, between credentialed experts and enthusiastic amateurs. Science magazine published Sibley’s article and Fitz’s reply, but Science refused to publish Sibley’s subsequent answer to Fitz. Moreover, they kept most of their coverage out of the peer-reviewed section and ran a journalistic article or note about the ongoing coverage. It was all very delicate and Science is still afflicted by the fact that they ran this article. The original finding still stands and Science says it has no intention of retracting Fitz’s original article. Officially, then, in the annals of peer review, the ivory-bill flourishes in Arkansas.

  But on the blogs, there was none of this supercilious fragility. The bloggers wanted to debate the evidence and test every claim. And they did it with brio.

  The argument put forward by Cornell’s rollout formed a trio of claims—the video, the sightings, and the sound/scaling evidence. Each pillar of the argument crumbled—overwhelmed by amateurs dissecting it, testing it, reevaluating it outside the heat of Cornell’s august authority. It must have been infuriating for Fitz.

  Those sounds recorded in the woods: readers quickly provided the more likely counterproof, with source and page number. Jackson’s In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, page 182, relates an account of hearing a blue jay give precisely the ivory-bill’s call in New Jersey—far outside the range of ivory-bills.

  One of Cornell’s arguments for no one seeing the bird in the years after their small clique had a few emotional sightings was that the bird was elusive and shy—despite the bird’s well-known reputation as a show-off. There are photographs from the old days of people putting the ivory-bill on their own heads and posing for the cameras. Woody Woodpecker’s gregarious character is modeled in part on the ivory-bill.

  Cornell argued that the more bashful birds had been selected out since the most gregarious and ostentatious ivory-bills would likely be the ones that got shot. Good point, until Nelson himself noted that the ivory-bill had been hunted intensively for two hundred years, which ends essentially around World War II:

  I see no reason why the Ivorybill would stay half-tame through over 200 years of hunting pressure, then make a quantum leap to ultra-wariness during 60+ years of no hunting pressure.

  Some of the blog posts do not address science at all, but just human nature. One writer pored over Harrison’s various statements and publications and put it bluntly and without ornamentation:

  Bobby [Harrison] has seen an Ivory-bill FIVE times now.

  Another of the best sightings among the Cornell team was Casey Taylor’s. She heard the double knocks and then saw the bird. That elevated her sighting in the minds of experienced birders since having more than one indicator is a pretty good index to authenticity. But Nelson read the account closely and noted:

  In “The Grail Bird,” page 246, Gallagher says that Taylor heard all the raps, and then: “Casey sat still for about a half-hour without seeing or hearing anything of interest.” Only after this half-hour without rapping did she glimpse a woodpecker.

  Open-source peer review brought up issues that individual scholars wouldn’t be able to see in time. For instance, the bloggers kept a running account of how many details got nudged ever so slightly in the direction of confirming the bird.

  Like Casey Taylor’s sighting, there existed a form of evidentiary drift in Cornell’s accounts, and Nelson’s blog caught every speck of it. The Luneau video? When Bobby Harrison first watched it, he said, “It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good.” Then, slowly but surely, he found himself agreeing with Fitz that the blurry image was “clearly an Ivory-bill.” Gallagher elevates the blur to solid proof, saying: “Virtually all of the ivory-bill’s major field marks were there, albeit fuzzy.”

  When 60 Minutes did a piece on the bird, Nelson questioned the description of Arkansas woods as some vast wilderness. The TV host purplishly described the bayou as “one of the most exotic and the most inhospitable environments in America, a vast primordial ooze, a place so wild, that the Big Woods have been called this country’s Amazon.” Forget the facts—constantly noted in the blog—that most sightings occurred within earshot of an interstate and the white noise of speeding traffic. (That was definitely true for my visits, too—the whine of distant high-speed traffic was inescapable.) But Nelson nailed it perfectly:

  Ok, the Big Woods isn’t small, but let’s not get carried away. According to this link, the Amazon’s total drainage basin is about 2.7 million square miles in size. The Big Woods of Arkansas is about 860 (.00086 million) square miles in size. In terms of square miles, South America’s Amazon is over 3000 times larger than “our Amazon.”

  Ultimately the blog settled on a metaphor for the Cornell sighting, and it was infuriating to the Ivy League ornithologists: Bigfoot. The bloggers organically generated a set of entertaining but serious Bigfoot rules to explain why the evidence in both the ivory-billed woodpecker and Bigfoot cases involved blurry video, fleeting sightings, and ambiguous proof of presence (scalings, footprints).

  The blogger explanation for why the video is always fuzzy (whether it’s Bigfoot, IBWO, Loch Ness, Chupacabra—doesn’t matter) was brilliant: The minute the view of, say, a Loch Ness Monster gets clearer, then the person can see that it’s a log. Similarly, the reason no one ever caught sight of the bird’s eponymous field marking—IBWO’s ivory bill—is because when observers did see the bill, it was black, like a pileated’s. The reason Bigfoot is always looking away or at an angle is because if you saw him square on, the bear’s trademark ears would give him away. The reason the bird never perches is because that would give the observer an extra second or two to calm down from the adrenaline rush of seeing an ivory-bill and realize that the markings are actually those of a pileated. And I should simply add, when I went out in the Big Woods with Tippit and later with Harrison—both times—the forest was fu
ll of pileateds. At dusk, especially, they rioted everywhere.

  Nelson cited a quote from Benjamin Radford of the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, nicely summing up the problem of having so much marginal evidence serving as solid proof: “I liken it to a cup of coffee—if you have many cups of weak coffee, they can’t be combined into strong coffee.”

  XI. The Explorers Club

  The one great flaw of blogs and journalism is that they have no way of making grand pronouncements. Both of those media are about unfinished things, first, rough drafts of something or other—discussions, not declarations. That’s the one thing about high authority. They do that declaration thing very well. Blogs and lowly reporters can get the word out, slowly, but they don’t get pageantry, flags, granite-chiseled peer-reviewed findings, $10 million budget lines, or press conferences.

  Today’s exploded, highly niched media ecosystem has not yet worked out a meaningful way to accommodate the new forms of truth assessment, especially in light of the Internet’s retooling of wikified amateurs into an uncoordinated form of (always ongoing) peer review. So what happens when the Great Citadel of Truth is assaulted successfully by the outsiders? In theory, it should be that the new facts get declared and everybody goes home to start fresh, working off the new reality. But it’s not like that in the real world. In the real world, you end up eating “Sweet-and-Sour Bovine Penis Braised, with Testicular Partners.”