"The bird-watching community is also mixed up in the politics. "There are groups who have received a lot of funding to obtain conclusive data on these birds and haven't managed to do so, and I've done it independently." One such group, he said, is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the country's leading center of ornithology research and the group who may have sighted the elusive woodpecker in 2005. "Professional jealousy is a huge problem in the field of ornithology," Collins said. So why wasn't his research published in an ornithology journal? The audio and video evidence combined, he says, give firm support to his claim that ivory-billed woodpeckers live at Pearl River. Collins used his mathematics expertise to construct sophisticated acoustical models of the bird's vocalizations. The audio recordings, which he obtained in conjunction with the videos, also smack of the Lord God bird, which makes very distinct double knocks when pecking, and makes vocalizations somewhat like a blue jay's and nothing like a pileated woodpecker's. Collins also analyzed the bird's coloring, and found that the pattern of white and black on its wings matched ivory-billed, not pileated. Careful frame-by-frame measurements revealed a flight speed of 15.6 meters per second (35 mph) – approximately its purported speed, according to the historical record, and much faster than its relative the pileated woodpecker. But, amazingly, the bird actually flew underneath the tree I was in, along the bayou almost directly below," he said.īy analyzing the size of the bird relative to its surroundings in the video, he determined that its wingspan was approximately 30 inches – the historically recorded size of an ivory-billed woodpecker. "The idea was to pick the tallest tree and get up above the tree tops so that I would be able to see the bird up to a quarter-mile away. Collins captured his best video and audio recordings from 75 feet off the ground.