NY Times Bird Brain

These are NOT distant gunshots
Gorman's still milking columns out of this

For months, New York Times columnist James Gorman has been making much about nothing with regard to the possible discovery of a woodpecker long thought extinct. He's written several stories to the effect that researchers sort of might have could have heard the bird, although evidence was inconclusive.

Today, he resurrects this gripping story with the following:

A team searching swampy Louisiana bottomland in January for the regal, perhaps extinct bird heard what they thought was a distinctive double-rap on a dead tree. But researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who did a computer analysis of digital recordings of the sounds, said yesterday that the listeners actually heard distant gunshots.

EXCUSE ME?! DISTANT GUNSHOTS?! And this merits at least three columns (since I started keeping track) in one of the world's great newspapers?

Or should I say, formerly great?

[Posted at 21:50 CST on 06/10/02] [Link]