I’ve completed reviewing the cards from the deployment discussed in three previous posts. As it turned out, the most dramatic and informative sequence was captured on July 29; it was the last sequence found in the course of the review.

To recapitulate: the tree is a hickory, and hickory bark is uniquely tough, tight, and hard to remove; when first found in early 2017, the tree had already been extensively scaled, probably during the spring and summer of 2016; additional and extensive scaling took place between early 2017 and early 2018; at the time the trail cam was first deployed in April 2018, I’d estimate that over 30% of the entire surface area of the tree had been stripped of bark.

This type of very extensive scaling on hickories has a distinctive appearance, and I hypothesize that it is diagnostic for Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I further hypothesize that it is beyond the physical capacity of Pileated Woodpeckers to do this type of work. We have not yet documented whatever is doing the initial scaling (which is the main objective of these deployments), but data collected thus far on Pileated Woodpecker foraging on hickories tend to exclude this species as the source of the initial work.

Minimal additional bark removal took place between April and October 2018, and all Pileated Woodpecker visits to the targeted part of the tree were captured by the trail cam, except for any that may have occurred between August 12 and August 21, when the camera malfunctioned. The images below are from the beginning and end of the deployment, and they reveal just how little bark was removed over a nearly six month period, when Pileated Woodpeckers visited the tree at least 23 times.

The breakdown of those visits may be related to beetle abundance near the interface of bark and sapwood; this could be relevant to peak ivorybill foraging times as well, although there were no possible ivorybill captures during this deployment.

Pileated Woodpeckers (alone and in pairs) visited the tree 10 times between late April and June – on May 1, May 3, May 8, May 12, May 21, May 25, May 28, May 30, June 1, and June 4.  There were nine visits between June 17 and July 3, (with two sets of of captures on June 17 and July 3rd). Hits dropped off dramatically after July 3rd. There were none between July 4 and July 25 and one each on July 26 and 28. The final hits were on September 24 and a very brief one on October 5.

The duration of these visits ranged from approximately one minute to over 20 minutes. At just under 15 minutes, with two birds present, the July 29th clip is one of the longer ones. Immediately below are the captures from July 26 and July 29 and a version of the July 29 capture at 1/10 speed, which makes it easier to see what the birds are doing while on the trunk. The relevant part of the clip ends at just after the one minute mark. If you have the capacity to download the captures and step through them frame by frame, that will also be helpful. Some additional discussion after the videos.

This capture shows the most extensive single incident of bark removal by a Pileated Woodpecker over the course of the deployment. It’s also the only incident in which bark is removed from an area that is not an edge. The area in question is on the upper right.

I think this illustrates the Pileated Woodpecker’s very limited capacity for bark removal on hickories. It takes the bird several minutes to remove approximately 8″x2″ of bark (crudely estimated, based on the size of the woodpecker). This is roughly equal to, and possibly less than, the area of many suspected IBWO chips like these.

In addition, it appears that the PIWO removed the bark by excavating through it, not by stripping it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the snag and remaining bark are farther along in the decay process, and hence the bark is likely easier to remove, than when the first two rounds of scaling took place.

This is congruent with what I’ve hypothesized; Pileated Woodpeckers are very well adapted for excavating, and they are capable of digging through even tough, dense hickory bark; however, they appear to be excavating but not to be capable of removing it by scaling in large chunks.

We will continue to collect data, which may end up contradicting the findings thus far, all of which suggest that some other animal is responsible for the initial, very extensive scaling. The main purpose of this deployment was to document what woodpecker activity on a tree that had already been scaled; I expected that this would involve Pileated Woodpeckers, not ivorybills. It will take considerable luck to predict which trees are likely to be scaled and capture whatever is doing the initial bark removal; that’s the primary focus of this effort. There are a lot of hickories in the woods, and we’ve only found a handful of impressively scaled ones over the years.