Case Study 1: Ivory-billed Woodpecker

After reading the first paragraph of the "Ivory-billed Woodpecker" case study, I knew, at that exact moment, my blog would be a hysterical rant on anthropogenic habitat destruction. Fortunately, this was not the case. Having read the case study in its entirety along with criticism from www.sciencemag.org, I not only came away astounded by the astute observational and experimental techniques used to distinguish an ivory-billed woodpecker from a pileated one, but how the scientific community is a battlefield of ideas, a place where a scientific theory is always open to falsification if new evidence is presented. For example, Fitzpatrick's claim, based on sound and video recordings, that the ivory-billed woodpecker still existed in North America was strongly criticized by David A. Sibley and Luis R. Bevier. These scientists argued that Fitzpatrick's observations did not provide independently verifiable evidence and his conclusions from digital video and deinterlaced video frames rested on mistaken interpretations of the bird's posture. In short, they believed the bird in the Luneau video was a normal pileated woodpecker. Firing back, Fitzpatrick argued that their claims were based on misrepresentations of a pileated woodpecker's underwing pattern and inaccurate models of takeoff and flight behavior. Also, their claims, he further argued, failed to explain evidence in the Luneau video of white dorsal plumage, distinctive flight behavior, and a perched woodpecker with white upper parts.