BANG BANG!
Posted on 06/09/2002 5:52:12 PM PDT by Pharmboy
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Listening devices placed in Louisiana swamps in hopes of recording the sound of the ivory-billed woodpecker picked up sharp raps that turned out to be gunfire, not sounds of the rare bird, researchers said Sunday. The ivory-billed woodpecker is widely believed to be extinct, but a Louisiana State University student's detailed account of a possible sighting in 1999 raised hopes that there are still some around in south Louisiana's Pearl River Wildlife Management Area.
In a search last winter by Cornell University and Zeiss Sports Optics of Chester, Va., a dozen acoustic recording units, or ARUs, were set out to record two to three months' worth of swamp sounds.
Captured on tape were a series of distinctive double-raps, reminiscent of the ivory-billed's distinctive rapping on dead wood.
"Sadly, analysis of the ARU data proved that the sounds were distant gun shots, with reverberations that sounded to human ears like drumming on a hollow snag," Zeiss Sports Optics said in a Sunday news release.
"If there is good news here, it is in knowing that the ARU technology could provide independent and conclusive evidence as to the nature of these sounds," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a leader of the February expedition.
Fitzpatrick said he still thinks it's possible that the ivory-billed woodpecker is living in parts of the Pearl River forest outside of the area covered by the machines.
Ivory-bills, sometimes called the Holy Grail of bird-watching, were the biggest woodpeckers in North America, with a 30-inch wingspan. They have been rare since the late 1800s and were last spotted in America 60 years ago.
Someone with a Tac-Trigger on a 10/22?
How long before some PETA-freak whines that further analysis of the tape reveals that the sounds are guns being used to slaughter the last remaining Ivory Peckerwoods?
Oh great. The swamps will be swarming with gay guys!
BANG BANG!
We have some slow peckers around here.
Not necessarily. The sonic boom from a single round, echoing off hundreds of different trees, can sound like a spastic machinegun.
I was working in the target butts, and the first thing I heard was the sharp crack (the sonic boom) of the round going overhead. Then came a fairly faint boom, the noise of the explosion at the muzzle. Then came the crack-crack-crack-crack of reflected shock waves as the bullet headed into the woods in the impact area. Finally, a loud SPLAT as the bullet hit a tree.
WOW. If they push that theory, it could be one of the biggest land grabs in American history! Birds fly!
It would be a fine thing to see Ivorybills again. They were huge, marvelous birds, and the they were also the southeastern indian symbol of war, and credited in myth with helping to find and release water, which had been hidden away in giant reeds, onto the earth for people so that they could prosper.
There were also ivorybills on Cuba but I think Fidel took care of that with his environmental programs. Maybe he found out that female Ivorybills weren't red in the head and evidently had them all executed, or perhaps the birds were pecking more than their allotment of wood and bugs.
Definitely possible. If you've eve been in the deep woods and swamps of Louisiana, you have to know there are places that still have never been seen by human eyes...... Really.
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