Credibility, evidence and discovery: the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker

Abstract

This paper discusses an effort to document the rediscovery of a North American bird that was widely believed to be extinct. In April 2005 a team of researchers announced publicly that they had identified an ivory-billed woodpecker 1 (Campephilus principalis) in the Cache River swamp in Arkansas. This announcement was a major news story, not only for ornithologists and amateur “birders”, but also for the public at large. The present paper uses publicly available documents to examine how the ornithologists sought to demonstrate their discovery of the bird. Although several professional field ornithologists described and sketched the bird, the effort to document the discovery focused intensively on a frame-by-frame analysis of a brief segment of videotape in which the (alleged) ivory-billed woodpecker was depicted in flight.