"We don't need your Civil War":BINAC declares IBWO cease fire

We just arrived back from Florida late this evening, and we've been thinking about this whole IBWO mess. While we have enjoyed all of the sniping and the insults and the back-stabbing, things have reached a new low.

Birders are attacking each other anonymously in forums, sending nasty private e-mails, are even threatening to sue one another over the whole fiasco, and then Hillary Clinton has to whine about it all. While this has been quite entertaining, it has also gotten a bit repetitive. Especially the whining part.

So we are hereby declaring a truce, a 72-hour unilateral cease-fire, on all IBWO-related issues. This means that we will not have any posts -- positive or negative -- about the freakin' Ivory-billed Woodpecker until Thursday morning. We will embargo a couple of posts we had ready to go. That means no bitching about Cornell or Auburn or anyone else for 72 hours. No responding to IBWO-related e-mails. And no surfing BirdForum. There are two exceptions to this cease-fire: First, we retain the right to defend ourselves if someone attacks in comments or on another site. Second (and you knew this was coming) the cease-fire is ended if Mr. Guppy reappears. (It's about time for him to surface again. Maybe he's figured out how to "un-hack" his web site? Or perhaps he just forgot his own password.)

Now, we don't expect anyone else to join us in this cease-fire. Hey, if you have a blog, you can write what the hell you want to. But therein lies the problem with unilatreal cease-fires: the disarming party usually gets killed! However, since this is merely a metaphorical disarmament (we're keeping all of our guns loaded!), we're willing to take that risk. For the children.