Veracity of Ivory-billed Woodpecker Claims

If we go a couple more years without proof that at least one Ivory-billed Woodpecker still lives in North America, I think that claims of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers will lose all veracity.—Geoffrey E. Hill (as quoted in this interview, published May 8, 2007, on the blog of Oxford University Press, the publisher of Hill’s Ivory-bill Hunters).

We must now be coming very, very near to the tipping point on this one. In his book, Hill had claimed the existence of at least nine pairs of these crow-sized woodpeckers along the Choctawhatchee River in the Panhandle of Florida. Last I knew, Hill et al.’s claims still remain unverified, their evidence not yet accepted as conclusive by the Florida Ornithological Society’s Records Committee.