Yesterday, Phil Vanbergen visited the search area and found fresh scaling of the kind I think is diagnostic for Ivory-billed Woodpecker on a hickory. This is an exciting development because we found no fresh work of this type last season.

While Phil was unable to get to the base of the tree to examine the bark chips, the scaling has the distinctive appearance, including abundant insect tunnels, discussed in multiple posts and on this page. While the video doesn’t show the detail that still photographs can, I think it conveys the extensiveness of the work more effectively than stills.

Edited to add: Phil found this striking clip of a foraging Crimson-crested Woodpecker (Campephilus melanoleucos). The similar appearance of the feeding sign should be apparent.

Update: Phil shot a second sequence from a different angle, and Steve Pagans has slowed it and edited it into two shorter clips. In the first, the edited version shows the scaled surface more clearly. The presence of buds in the second suggests that the tree is still alive, though probably just barely. If you listen to Phil (sounding like a death metal singer or, as he put it, Megatron from Transformers), you’ll hear him mention thinking of a lightning strike. Steve Pagans also noted the similarity. If there was a strike, it wasn’t recent, although it’s possible that a strike some years ago wounded the tree, setting the stage for a Cerambycid infestation.

 

We’re confident that this work was done between late December and yesterday because we visited the same location in December and Phil photographed Patricia and me with a huge relict cypress; the hickory is about 50 yards away, and the work would have been obvious to us had it been there at the time.

April 4 is the earliest I’ve found recent scaling of this type, and the January or February date for this work is a surprise. But the winter has been unusually warm.

Edited to Add: After visiting the tree and another one nearby, I’m retracting the above. I doubt that the initial scaling on these two trees was done more recently than September 0f 2016. I have also revised the title accordingly.

Phil returned yesterday and trained a camera on this hickory. I’ve never seen signs of a return visit to such an extensively scaled tree, and image quality may be an issue because conditions required placing the camera farther away than we’d like. Nevertheless, we had to give it a try.

I’ve written an in-depth post on bark that is currently password protected. I’m awaiting some feedback and a copy of a paper for which I’ve only read the abstract. I plan to make it public soon.