Also, see The Great Debate, the results of a survey on perceptions of the evidence for ivory-billed woodpeckers. I participated in the survey, as did many others. The survey was probably not representative of birders as a whole. It suffers from the usual online survey problems of self selection. In addition, the survey was announced mainly through birding email lists and blogs. In the survey group, 83% were male, 58% had at least attended graduate school, and 97% considered themselves to have moderate or high level identification skills. Here are the results for whether the ivory-billed woodpecker exists:
Definitely does not exist: 4%I forget how I answered the survey in September. My answer now would waver somewhere between a possibly and a probably exists. I am surprised that the "definitely does not exist" option received the fewest votes by far since the skeptical voices in the bird blogosphere have been quite loud, and the survey got a lot of promotion from them.
Probably does not exist: 27%
Possibly exists: 27%
Probably exists: 23%
Definitely exists: 21%