Or as I would rather put it: tell me it’s totally nonexistent, forget it, no way. But I have to see your EVIDENCE.

I rule nothing out. Ever. The best the evidence (or lack of same) can do to me is: well, I’m not placing any bets on this one, until evidence to the contrary changes my mind.

I can see, though, how this crow could have slipped through the dragnet. The apparent sudden avalanche of evidence came from alerted birders making concerted efforts to separate this bird from the other one – something that won’t go on too much, on a faraway isle, with a bird generally considered not to exist.

(Or with an animal that, well, you are nuts when you report seeing one. But I digress.)

If you are siccing a Pamela Rasmussen on the case, says here, you have some wheat that is pretty darn difficult for anyone but the experts to separate from the chaff. Cool, sure. That’s way spiffier than an American crow, looks to me. But not quite the sasquatch of the bird world.

The Bornean leopard, actually, I’d put a notch or three above this one on the cool scale. When I saw my first photos of that one I said, holy cow! That doesn’t look like a Neofelis; that looks like Panthera pardus in a Neofelis suit! It actually surprises me that it took scientists so long to run the isolate on that one.

But that it did says a lot to me about dreaming, hoping, or (as I’d rather put it) awaiting further evidence.

I know, I know. It seems highly unlikely those two species are still around. I was just engaging in some “what if” wish-fulfilment.

I can dream, can’t I??? Still, YOU NEVER KNOW. They said THIS critter was extinct. Just like the Coelacanth was “extinct”.

I was stunned.

Then I read it again.

There’s another crow out there. Similar bird, similarly colored.

I was saying, there’s no way this is real. CORVIDS CAN’T HIDE. They’re notoriously noisy and social.

But you know what? Under the circumstances described here, this one indeed could, the same way the Bornean clouded leopard “hid” by simply looking enough like the other one that no one noticed the differences for over a century.

Not so fast on the ivorybill and the pigeon, gang. This seems kind of garden-variety hidden to me. Cool, but nowhere near ivorybill or passenger-pigeon cool. Those babies are still very big-time odds against. I’d put more money on the sasquatch and the yeti, in fact, and I do.