Ivory-billed Ballyhoo Redux

Having failed to prove the bird's existence in Arkansas, despite millions of wasted dollars, some bird researchers have miraculously discovered another bunch of the phantom birds in Florida:

Ivory-billed woodpeckers, believed extinct until recently, have been seen 14 separate times since May last year along a remote Florida panhandle river, a team of Canadian and U.S. bird researchers have announced.

One American researcher spotted two of the huge woodpeckers at the same time, strongly suggesting that a breeding population of Ivory-bills has managed to survive on the Choctawhatchee River...

[The] team also recorded hundreds of distinctive vocal calls and rapping used by the woodpeckers to communicate, found a score of recent tree-nesting cavities of the right size and identified dozens of the bird's unique chisel marks on bark.

Pretty conclusive, don't you think? But what's this...?

Yet despite visiting the area regularly since last May and camping out there continuously for almost six months, the researchers from Windsor and from Auburn University in Alabama failed to photograph the magnificent bird.

Fourteen sightings, and not One. Single. Photograph. Uh-huh. Sure. How's that, do you think?

"We need the kind of photograph that will convince people who are skeptical," said [professor Dan] Mennill, who didn't see the bird himself during an eight-day visit to the area.

He explained that the team members paddling along the Choctawhatchee instinctively grabbed for binoculars rather than cameras when they spotted a likely bird.

Your story is getting really, really, really thin.

I may not be the sharpest person on the planet, but I know what cow manure smells like--and you, Professor Mennill, positively reek of it.