Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 
 Postdoc Nominations 
 Student Requests 
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Thursday, May 18, 2023
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Postdoc Seminar

Elusiveness, persistence, and behaviors of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Michael Collins
Naval Research Laboratory

The critically endangered Ivory-billed Woodpecker is one of the iconic species of North America. Due to a 'perfect storm' combination of factors related to habitat and behavior, this ultra-elusive bird has repeatedly been feared extinct only to be rediscovered during the past 100 years. The most recent rediscovery, which took place in Arkansas, was announced in an article that was featured on the cover of Science in 2005. It was the first report of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by ornithologists in several decades. Although another group of ornithologists reported sightings in Florida the following year, the persistence of the species became controversial when neither group managed to obtain a clear photo. This talk will discuss video footage obtained in Louisiana and Florida during encounters with birds that were identified in the field as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. All three of the videos show field marks, body proportions, flights, and other behaviors consistent with that species but no other species of the region. According to historical accounts, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker has spectacular flights, but no flights appear in the only existing historical film (obtained in 1935). The videos reveal secrets about the flights and other behaviors of this fascinating species that were thought to have been lost forever when it was feared to be extinct. Most woodpeckers signal by drumming, but the Campephilus woodpeckers signal with double knocks. One of the discoveries that came out of this work is that drumming and double knocks may both be modeled in terms of a harmonic oscillator, with periodic forcing in one case and impulsive forcing in the other. In particular, a double knock is driven by a single thrust of the body.

Michael Collins' Bio

Michael Collins was born in Greenville, Pennsylvania, in 1958. After getting an education at MIT (B.S.) and Northwestern (Ph.D.) in mathematics, he began a career in 1985 at the Naval Research Laboratory, where he has divided his time between the offices in Washington (D.C.) and at Stennis Space Center (Mississippi). One of his research interests has been non-separable wave propagation problems in ocean acoustics, seismology, Arctic acoustics, and other areas and the development of techniques based on the parabolic equation method for solving such problems accurately and efficiently. His other interests include source localization, signal processing, inverse problems, and experiments (at sea and in the lab). Outside of his day job, he has has an interest in the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and its conservation. After the rediscovery of this ultra-elusive bird was announced in an article that was featured on the cover of Science in 2005, he decided to launch a search effort in the Pearl River swamp in Louisiana, which borders the Stennis Space Center.