I don’t expect to return to our search area until sometime this fall, but I hope that my schedule will allow me to spend a lot more time in the field next season. Overall, this was a challenging week due to high temperatures and severe back pain that troubled me from the end of the first day on. Nonetheless, it was a productive trip, and weather conditions were generally tolerable – hot and humid but not unbearably so, with daytime temperatures mostly in the high 80s. Woodpeckers, except for Red-bellieds, were generally quiet and unobtrusive. The only Pileateds I saw were responding to playbacks, and while I didn’t keep count, I’d estimate I heard their vocalizations an average of 2 or 3 times a day.

In contrast to winter and early spring, the woods are filled with other sounds – songbirds, frogs, cicadas, squirrels – making it much harder to separate signal from noise. Green frog calls can sound a little like double knocks at a distance, especially if you’re walking, and the squirrel calls in this recording were intriguing enough to capture, as only the somewhat kent-like sounds were audible to me in the field, something for other searchers to bear in mind.

May 18

I had a 6 am flight out of JFK. After arriving in New Orleans, I met Frank Wiley for coffee and then drove to his house, changed clothes and got to the search area at a little after 2 pm. The area I visited is the one closest to a parish road. This is a part of the southern sector in which we’ve consistently found feeding sign since 2012 and where I found a number of recently scaled trees in March of this year. Despite full leaf out, I was able to find quite a few more recently scaled trees in the general vicinity of those discussed in the most recent trip report.

Unfortunately, and perhaps because my attention was on looking for feeding sign, I got somewhat turned around and wandered considerably farther south than I had intended, running the risk not only of trespassing but also of getting stranded in the woods. I noticed this at about 6 pm. Fortunately, I wasn’t too far from the road, just well south of where I wanted to be. It took me a half hour to reach the road (at which point I noticed my back was hurting badly) and another ten minutes or so to get to the car. I didn’t sleep much or well that night, despite having been awake since 3:30 am.

May 19

My back continued to bother me, so I tried to take it easy by spending the morning in the most accessible part of the search area. I found a few additional scaled trees, some with old work and excavation that seems consistent with what Tanner described, others with scaling that looked fresh.

May 20

Travis Lux, a radio freelancer working on an ivorybill story, spent the morning in the field with me. (Most days this week I could only manage being out from around 6 am – 1 pm.) We visited the northern sector. I did not find any new feeding trees.

We passed the large downed limb where we had a camera trap for some time, and there has been no fresh work on it since the flooding in March. And only a small quantity of bark has been removed since the camera was deployed.

This may be significant, since it seems likely that common animals with small home ranges would return repeatedly to the same feeding spot. In the case of this limb, it seems to have been scaled by something unknown, prior to our camera deployment and again a little over a month later. Squirrels, Red-bellied, and Pileated Woodpeckers were captured or seen on the target limbs, but they did no scaling. As I’ve mentioned previously, in most instances, we’re finding that trees are visited by whatever’s scaling them once or sporadically over a period of months.

We continued southward into the area discussed in the last trip report; we’ve found feeding sign regularly in this small area every season since 2013-2014. I did not find any new feeding trees: however, there was additional scaling on a couple of the trees found in recent trips, most notably the large dying sweet gum below (the next to last image in the post). I’m hoping that Frank will be able to train a camera on this treetop once our old Reconyxes have been repaired. The resolution on our other cameras is too poor to aim them so high; the same may be true of the Reconyx cams, but the quality is somewhat better.

We did a stake out in the area for a couple of hours but did not see or hear anything of interest. On the way out, I noticed that one of our suspected feeding trees had some very fresh scaling on it. This is a small tree with thin bark, and the chips were mostly very small. I do not suspect this to be ivorybill work and have a hunch that it was done by a Hairy, taking advantage of scaling that had been begun by another species.

May 20

I returned to the part our search area that’s most readily accessible from the road, so I was in the woods before sunrise. I found a few additional recently scaled trees, some with very large chips at the base. One of these was heavily scaled on the bole as well as on the branches, and although the bark was loose in some spots; it was tight in others. The presence of twigs and small branches suggests that it had died fairly recently, even though there were signs of Pileated Woodpecker excavation on decaying parts of the bole.

 

May 21

Phil and Eric Vanbergen joined me, and we returned to the area I’d visited the day before, again getting into the woods early. We found a six more scaled trees, took GPS points, and measurements. The trees were all live or fairly freshly dead. All were sweet gums, as has been the case for virtually all trees found this season (with two possible exceptions, one of which is shown in the May 22^nd entry). Diameters of the trees measured were 14.7”, 19”, 21”, 25.1”, 26.2”, and 27”

Four of the six trees listed above were found in pairs, about 5’ apart in one instance and 20’ apart in the other. In the case of one pair, a long dead sweet gum and a live hickory within 30’ also showed some older scaling. Most of this work was recent but not fresh. We found large chips at the base of the pair of trees that are 5’ feet apart; these were probably a few months old.

While I did not keep count, and we only took coordinates for a few of the trees found this time around, I’d estimate I found a total of 15-18 recently scaled sweet gums in and around the southern concentration described in the last trip report.

May 22

The Vanbergens were along again. It’s refreshing to spend time in the woods with young people (Phil’s in college and Eric’s in high school) who know and love nature, something that seems to interest fewer and fewer people in their age group. They have suggested some interesting strategies for searching, and I’m looking forward to their participation next season.

We went to the northern area, arriving at the scaling concentration at around 7:30. We staked out feeding trees until around 10 with no results.

Here are some of Eric’s wonderful photos: cottonmouth, pale lobelia, bark scaling, swamp milkweed, and another cottonmouth. He identified the plants.

After that we headed further south to an area they hadn’t visited before. We found a little bit of fairly recent scaling on a dead hickory about 20 yards from where I found a heavily scaled hickory in 2013. The scaling is not extensive; it’s clearly targeted at larger Cerambycids, but given the small patches, Hairy Woodpecker is a distinct possibility. I was unable to find any fresh chips, so the work is probably several months old.

May 23

I returned to the northern area alone and spent the morning staking out the same large feeding tree. I watched Red-bellied Woodpeckers flying to and from the tree sporadically, usually spending very brief periods pecking and gleaning on both scaled and unscaled areas and drumming from time to time. At 7:30, the male landed at the top of scaled stub and called. The female arrived; they copulated, and she flew off. He departed a few seconds later. At 8:30, I recorded the squirrel calls, and at 10:35, one of the RBWOs landed near the top of the scaled stub, peered around at me, and eventually started to drum. I called it a day shortly after noon. Here’s another image of the sweet gum top I was staking out, to give a sense of how extensively scaled it is in the crown.

I hiked out, following a rather circuitous route. A few hundred yards from the concentration, I found a recently dead sweet gum with a few small scaled patches but no extensive work. I think this is another indication that this scaling is not being done by a common, evenly distributed species. Work tends to appear in bunches, with scattered sporadic examples elsewhere, but in the two areas discussed in this post, bark scaling on deciduous trees has been abundant in concentrated locations, over several years, and is much harder to find and scattered outside of these “hot zones”.

On the 24^th, I drove to New Orleans, stopping in Lafayette for lunch and ivorybill talk with Wylie Barrow and Tommy Michot.

I realize this has been a very image-heavy post. I sometimes think it’s hard to convey the quantity and unusual nature of the bark scaling we’re finding in this area and hope this does a somewhat more effective job at making it clear than some previous efforts.

That’s all for this season. I’ll be doing some additional posts on old material as well as one on foraging sign concentrations and tree species in the weeks ahead. I may also upload a lot more images of feeding sign to Flickr for those (if any) who haven’t seen enough of it. And of course, if there’s anything to report from Louisiana, you’ll read it here. I hope that the insights and data that have emerged this season will guide us next year.