On this trip, I was joined by Patricia Johnson (my wife) who was making her first visit to our search area in over two years. Phil Vanbergen was along on Friday, when a classmate of his, Jeremy Irion, spent also spent the day with us. Steve Pagans, retired forester at D’Arbonne National Wildlife Refuge, was very active in our efforts until he was sidelined with back trouble. He too made his first visit in over two years on Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s great to have Steve along for his birding skills and knowledge of this habitat type. Phil returned on Tuesday and Wednesday, and spent Thursday in the woods on his own. Frank Wiley was unable to get out this time around.
Prior to our departure, rain was predicted for three of our planned field days, but as it turned out, the weather was generally tolerable, if cold at times; Saturday was the only day when conditions, high winds and predicted thunderstorms, kept us away. Patricia and I took that day as an opportunity to visit Tensas National Wildlife Refuge (on the site of the Singer Tract) and Bayou Cocodrie National Wildlife Refuge. More on these visits below.
Although I didn’t have any possible encounters (Steve and Patricia’s will be discussed in Part 2), the trip was an incredibly productive one for me. We found a good deal of recent feeding sign. I also took the opportunity to look at over 10 hickories that have been scaled within the last several years. This is the type of work I think is most compelling for ivorybill.
I got what I think are some important new insights and some ideas about how whatever is stripping bark is behaving over time; these merit a separate post that will likely follow Part 2 of the trip report; I also anticipate writing an addendum to the feeding sign page I added recently. I hope these insights can inform our strategies going forward. It’s especially helpful to get fresh perspectives, so I’m grateful to Phil, Steve, and Patricia. Each in their own way helped me think a little more deeply about my observations; a conversation I had with Frank after a long day in the field was similarly helpful.
The groups of images in this post are in “tiled mosaic” format. Clicking on any single image will enable you to scroll through the group and enlarge the individual photographs if you choose to.
We met Phil on the edge of what we call Sector 1 at 6:45 am on the 16th. The weather was cloudy, cold, and windy; later in the day, the thermometer soared to nearly seventy, but the skies remained a wintry gray, less than ideal conditions for finding feeding sign or observing birds. Nevertheless we did find some recent work on both standing and downed sweetgums and on a broken hickory limb, all of this in an area where we’ve found an abundance of scaling every search season. None of this work is in the category I find most compelling; the hickory limb is probably most interesting due to the characteristics of hickory bark and the very large bark chip we found below the limb. Given what we’ve observed on hickory boles, this may be good target tree for later in the season.
The scaling on the downed limb has some features that might point toward Pileated, especially the layered appearance at the lower right and the patchiness of the work on the smaller limb. Conversely, the shredding of the cambium on the stub is consistent with what Edith Kuhn Whitehead told us her father associated with ivorybills.
Phil and I considered aiming a trail cam at the downed limbs but decided the work was not quite interesting enough.
The weather forecast for the 17th was ominous, with winds upwards of 20 mph and thunderstorms predicted for the afternoon. Patricia and I thought we might be able to spend a couple of hours in Sector 1, but when we reached the trailhead we found a truck parked where we were planning to walk in. Given the bad weather and the presence of hunters, we decided to head straight for Tensas, a pilgrimage I’d been wanting to make for some time.
The drive took a couple of hours, and our Wayz app sent us on a couple of roads that dead-ended in bean fields, but we finally made it, only to find the visitor center closed for the weekend.
We took a walk on the boardwalk behind the headquarters and found a dead tree that had been almost completely stripped of bark, large soft slabs of which were lying around the base. I’m posting a photograph to illustrate how difficult it can be to explain what we’re finding to those who haven’t seen it firsthand. I doubt there are ivorybills in Tensas, but if I found this work in our area, I wouldn’t suspect ivorybill. The remaining adhering bark is loose and decaying; the large slabs we found on the ground were soft and pliable. The tree in the background has a little bit of scaling on it too, but it is in an advanced state of decay, and the bark has not been removed from large, contiguous areas.
As we drove around Tensas, we did note occasional instances of high branch scaling, but nothing remotely suggestive. Again I’m again including these examples in hopes of providing more clarity with regard to the kinds of feeding sign I find suggestive for ivorybill; this work doesn’t qualify; it is on very small, longer dead limbs; it does not involve large, contiguous areas; nor does it reach the bole or larger parts of the limbs.
We spent a couple of hours exploring the refuge from the road, stopping at Africa Lake, on the West side of the Tensas River, and then drove Sharkey Road, stopping for a somber moment on the bridge over John’s Bayou. I’m facing south in the picture below; Tanner would have walked north to the core of the home range. There are strips of maturing woods along the banks of the bayou but bean fields to the east and west. Tensas is big, extensively wooded, and an impressive restoration effort is under way, but the visit left me saddened, with a more visceral sense of what was lost when the Singer Tract was logged.
From Tensas, we went to Bayou Cocodrie, a nearly 15,000 acre refuge that’s part of a large, east-central Louisiana potential habitat complex. While the corridors are not uninterrupted, they encompass many thousands of acres of maturing forest, from D’Arbonne and Tensas National Wildlife Refuges to Raccourci Island and Tunica Hills. There’s some connectivity with the Atchafalaya Basin as well. Bayou Cocodrie is fairly isolated and hard to reach (Wayz was unhelpful again); it includes a small (775 acre) stand of old growth hardwoods (the Fisher Tract), and there may be a good deal more surrounding forest that’s suitable for ivorybills. I met a professional hunting guide a couple of years ago, and he claimed to have had an encounter there. We’re planning to visit Bayou Cocodrie and see the Fisher Tract and surrounding areas on my next visit.
Patricia and I were on our own on the 18th, which was a much colder, clearer day after some early morning clouds broke up. We spent the early part of the day in the northeastern part of Sector 1 and didn’t find anything of interest. We went to the scaling concentration in Sector 3 in the latter part of the morning and stayed in the area until about 3 pm.
I didn’t notice any new scaling worth mentioning, but we found a limb that had fallen and broken apart in the storms that had raged through the night before. The scaling had been done before the branch fell, and except for one targeted dig, there was no associated excavation. While some of the bark had loosened, it was tight (impossible to remove without an implement) on the edges. I’ve included several images because they help illustrate the difference between the very extensive scaling we’re finding in our area and what’s common elsewhere (as shown in some of the Tensas photos). Patricia is 5’9″.
Stay tuned for Part 2.