Response to Comment on "Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America"
John W. Fitzpatrick1*,
Martjan Lammertink1,2,
M. David Luneau, Jr.3,
Tim W. Gallagher1 and
Kenneth V. Rosenberg1
1 Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, 159 Sapsucker Woods Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
2 Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Mauritskade 61, 1092 AD Amsterdam, Netherlands.
3 Department of Engineering Technology and Department of Information Technology, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR 72204, USA.
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Fig. 1. Luneau video field 33.3 (A) shows the first major appearance of the woodpecker's right wing to the left of the tupelo trunk. The white triangle has black above and a small black spot between the lower edge and the trunk. We interpret this as a lateral view of the opening wing of an ivory-billed woodpecker as the bird begins to turn away from the approaching observers, matched here by a montage (B) of a specimen's wing (C) superimposed behind a tupelo trunk. Sibley et al. (2) propose, instead, that the pattern is a vertically extended underwing of a pileated woodpecker (D), but comparison with a pileated woodpecker wing specimen at such an angle (E) reveals flaws in their diagram. A pileated woodpecker wing would show a broad black border entirely encircling the white and comprising 60 to 70% of the wing area. If the wing were tilting away from or toward the viewer, thus showing less black, the white underwing also would be extremely narrow (F). Moreover, the position of the tail and body proposed by Sibley et al. (2) in this field are incompatible with the sequence of movement observed in adjacent frames.
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Fig. 2. Effects of video artifacts on wing patterns of pileated woodpecker and ivory-billed woodpecker. To reenact the Luneau video (1), life-sized models with flappable wings were painted to resemble pileated woodpeckers (A) and ivory-billed woodpeckers (B). Deinterlaced video fields of these models shot with the same camera, distance, and light conditions as the Luneau video reveal the prominent black edge on the pileated woodpecker model (C). The ivory-billed woodpecker model shows a white underwing with black wingtips, the central black wing line being lost because of white dominance and poor video resolution (D). Our interpretive sketches of these fields differentiate the clear black trailing edge of the pileated woodpecker (E) from indistinct dark borders of the ivory-billed woodpecker model (F), which are video artifacts. Sibley et al. (2) erroneously interpreted such artifacts in the Luneau video as a thin, black trailing edge. Deinterlaced, poor-resolution video fields of pileated woodpeckers in flight (G, I, and K) show wing patterns resembling the pileated woodpecker in the reenactment. Deinterlaced video fields from the Luneau video (H, J, and L) show wing patterns resembling the ivory-billed woodpecker in the reenactment.
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