Male gonads

Cyberthrush quite rightly thinks that I may have been oversimplifying. Guilty as charged... but I'll say here what I've said in the comments section there (once it goes through moderation).


This was after comment 1 was losttttt In..... SPACEEEEEEEEE

Bollocks!
I'll try to remember what I said, but my original comment was a lyrical triumph of chemical insight, of which this is only a pale grey shadow of ineloquence. I'll try my best though. As I recall, it went a little like this...

OK I'll admit I skirted perilously round the edges of reason in that post, and oversimplified at best. Maybe the point was very much like a point I think you made a while back, viz. that the birds don't care what we think. They'll continue to do what they are doing, even if that is rotting and dissolving to oil, irrespective of our opinions and irrespective of the identity of any video or individual sighting. but fact 1 (maybe FACT 1 - it depends on how hard a day it's been) stands. I will agree that IBWOs were never that easy to see either, but fact (FACT :-)) is that they could be seen, well and repeatedly, with patience, and that there were people who could live and work among them even when their population must have been perilously, perhaps terminally, low. FACT/fact/lie 2 is an oversimplification, but IBWOs could certainly be very conspicuous at times without aspiring to this mythical will-o-the-wisp type level where you can only see them if you're not looking straight at them. I will accept FACT 3 is a little frivolous :-), but will contend that if IBWOs went extinct a few seconds ago, we still wouldn't hear them.

As of OCtober last year I was prepared to believe that although the Arkansas video was a PIWO it miught have inspired some birders to go out and find the real birds in Florida. I absolutely accept the contention that the American birding community gave up on IBWOs too soon. I think it stretches credulity to think that birds, including these hypothesised Florida 9 pairs, could escape the combined digital imagery of all the hair-trigger search teams and goodness knows who else for another search season. Except of course if they aren't there.

Where the heck do those Brits learn English anyway?!

Well I for one learnt it at Swiss finishing school of Upper Class girls. The first sentence of Swiss German they translated into English for me was 'Sir, if you don't stop looking through the window at the girls, we will have to arrest you.'