Mmmphh ooommmgrhp grrrmmuupp, excuse me, I know its not polite to write with my mouth full, but I’m having some warm crow (actually, since I’m vegan, it’s crowfurky.)

Last week in my Ivory-billed Doubting Thomas article I lamented the fact that I had not been able to find any images from the video capturing the alleged ivory-billed woodpecker in the Big Woods of Arkansas. An expert videographer had reviewed the video and researchers had stated that out-takes provided definitive evidence that the bird in question was indeed an ivory-billed.

Well, I found those out-takes. You can access them too. Go to www.sciencemag.org and follow the links to the piece on the ivory-billed. You can download the PDF of the article with the out-takes in it.

The very first image is one of the bird perched on a tree. I could not even detect this from the video itself. To me this image is the most telling. It shows just a portion of the dorsal surface of a bird perched on the side of a tupelo gum. The image is of “Bigfoot” quality, but for the life of me I can’t think of anything it could be other than an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The paper goes on to describe other clips from the video. I don’t know if they could stand alone without the image of the perched bird.

I viewed the video several times before writing last week’s article (May 11) and did not find it definitive. But this “deinterlaced” clip of the perched bird has me hooked. The way I see it, it’s still not a slam-dunk but it does appear to be a break away layup.

I still don’t see how this bird could have existed for 60 years with no verifiable sightings. I’m surprised no one has shot one and brought it in for proof. That’s how Dr. Lowry found out about the ivory-billeds in the Singer tract in Louisiana.

Julie Weston is a wildlife ecologist and geneticist. She posted a short discussion on Carolina Birds listserv with a couple of possible explanations of how the ivory-billed may have survived.

According to Weston when wild populations suddenly decrease drastically, as was the case with the ivory-billed when its habitat was destroyed across the Southeast, they experience what geneticists call a bottleneck.

“When this happens, the odds of two deleterious alleles combining become much higher, these genetic problems are expressed, and individuals begin dying off because they have inherited ‘bad genes’.

“So if the [ivory-billed] did not evolve to tolerate inbreeding, and they also went through a bottleneck, how could they have survived? This is where it gets interesting. As inbreeding increases in small, bottlenecked populations, yes, many individuals die, or otherwise are compromised in their ability to reproduce (which is the equivalent of death, ecologically speaking). But in such a population, the individuals who are dying are the ones carrying those deleterious alleles. If they die, they can’t pass on those bad genes. As this continues, the only individuals who actually survive and pass on their genes are the healthy ones. So the frequency of the bad genes initially increases, but if luck is with the population and they can hold on long enough, the frequency of the bad genes will then begin to decline, leaving the survivors inbred but genetically healthy enough to survive, at least for a while. This is one scenario which may have happened with [ivory-billeds.]” Weston wrote.

Weston’s second theory is that ivory-billeds have maintained because they have been able to produce successful dispersers. “[Ivory-billeds] have been rumored to occur in Louisiana and other locations over the past few decades. If the bird is truly able to survive in both bottomland and pine forests, then the few remaining populations may be exchanging individuals and, hence, genes. Only one individual per generation needs to successfully disperse and raise offspring in order for gene flow to continue among populations. [Ivory-billeds] lifespan is up to 15 years. Even though generations overlap with each other, these birds are long-lived enough that it’s quite possible they have been able to maintain one successful disperser every 10 years or so, and thus maintain some semblance of genetic health.”

If there are still ivory-billeds — and that video clip has me thinking it’s quite a distinct possibility — I believe Weston’s first hypothesis to be correct. I just can’t see small pockets of ivory-billeds maintaining and even dispersing over the past 60 years with no confirmed sightings.

And I think better confirmation is needed. Cornell and The Nature Conservancy have staked their professional reputations on the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They must be pretty certain. Now they need to document that existence. I’m sure they are working very hard to do that.

(Don Hendershot can be reached at ddihen@earthlink.net)