Ivory-billed Woodpecker: What Are “Field Notes”?

An easy question with an easy answer: they’re notes made in the field with the bird in view. But the newly e-published Auburn University paper conflates genuine field notes with the post factum written narratives of a sighting, calling the latter “transcribed field notes.”

The only field notes in sight here are the pages ripped from Tyler Hicks’s notebooks. And those are extremely interesting and profoundly suggestive pages; but the accounts that follow them are by no stretch of the imagination “transcriptions.” They are written memories, and should have been treated as such, with full information given about the circumstances of their composition and the time that passed between the original sighting and the drafting of the narratives. To suggest, as the paper does, that these are simply neatly typed copies of words scribbled in the field falls somewhere between sloppy and dishonest.