AT least those birds really exist. Here in Arkansas, some yahoo takes some grainy movie footage of a Pileated woodpecker, claimed it was a formerly believed extinct Ivory Billed Woodpecker (there was not enough detail in the bad video to make a positive ID), and vast acres were shut down to a lot of the former use.
Millions of dollars and many teams from some of the top Universities and other research organizations have come in and combed the area and have found ZERO evidence of an Ivory Bill. Lots of Pileated, which look very similar to it (and indeed - there is a natural color phase that looks a LOT like the Ivory Bill). Further, the place where the footage was supposedly taken does not match the normal environment the Ivory Bill favored - but it does fit perfectly the preferred habitat for... Pileated Woodpeckers.
But much like the hoax formerly known as “Manmade Global Warming”, those with power just won’t let go.
I’d heard that someone claimed to have discovered IBWs down there & had suspicions about the motives.
I was doing a little research on black bears recently, and found that they’re now classified into a wide range of “subspecies” based on slight color variations. Not surprisingly, several of those “subspecies” are listed as endangered or threatened on either the state or federal level, even where the species itself is abundant.
I wonder what industries were emerging in all those areas where the “subspecies” were suddenly “discovered”...