It’s difficult to write about such an eventful year, so it seems best to tackle it in a series of posts. The publication of our paper was, of course, a major milestone, as was the Fish and Wildlife Service’s non-decision decision on delisting. The latter had deep personal significance, not least because my 2018 submission in response to the initial delisting proposal was used (and mischaracterized) to justify the proposed rule. Future posts will focus on the delisting and media narratives and framing.

On the subject of media, a recent story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Baton Rouge Advocate was one of the best post-publication pieces, at least as I see it. The headline’s “Die Hards” can be read in a positive light; it can also be read as marginalizing our efforts. But the article was solid piece that included reasonable outside perspectives.

Also of possible interest is a recent journal publication entitled, “Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge” by Hannah Hunter. I appreciate the article for its emphasis on acoustic evidence. We humans generally privilege the visual, video above all. In the age of GIFs, memes, and Tik-Tok that unfortunate tendency has metastasized; it is present even in the Times-Picayune piece and many if not most of the better treatments of our work.

The search season is just getting started; Project Principalis will have a steady presence at our main study site throughout, but I’m planning to spend most of my field time at other sites this year. I hope to return to the promising area we visited briefly for the Times-Picayune story in February. Next month, I will be scouting patches of promising habitat not far from the study site, a process that began last spring and continued in October.

Don Scheifler, Mike Weeks, and I spent part of one day in October at a very interesting location, with mature forest conditions similar to those at our study site. There have been some recent, intriguing rumors from the vicinity. In the course of this very brief visit, we found a little old high branch scaling and some very impressive work on the trunk of a living oak (Nuttall’s, I think). Interestingly, it appears that there is much older scaling below the large, fresh patch. Finding this type of work with such ease is very encouraging.

Walking was easy, and we benefitted from the recent drought; the site is reportedly hard to reach except in very dry conditions. I hope to return later in the season, if scheduling and conditions allow, and expect that some others on the team will visit before then.

There have been credible recent reports, including recorded double knocks from the area that Tommy Michot, Bob Ford, and I visited with Alex Lubben (the Times-Picayune reporter) and photographer Chris Granger at the end of November. We found no fresh scaling during the two days we spent there. Tommy spent a day or two scouting before I arrived. I met him briefly before checking into a hotel on November 28. That afternoon, he had two series of single knocks – clearly not foraging or gunshots – in apparent response to anthropogenic knocking; these came shortly before my arrival and again after my departure. The following day, several of us heard a clear single knock in response to my ADK series. Later, Bob – who had moved a hundred or more yards to our west – heard a double knock, again in apparent response to ADKs.

The forest composition differs from the location mentioned above and our study site. It is also less mature; I suspect the best areas were cut in the 1940s or ’50s; many mature cottonwoods in these locations are starting to die. (The dead cottonwood branches were often devoid of bark, but it wasn’t clear whether this was old scaling, sloughing, or a combination of the two.) I don’t yet have a logging history or know if one is available, but if I’m right, the age of these patches is roughly comparable to parts of John’s and Mack’s Bayous in the 1930s. There are certainly enough dead and dying trees and trees big enough for roosts or nests to make it interesting and worthy of more attention.

We did find some intriguing excavation on sycamores, a species that frequently hosts Mallodon (or Stenodontes) dasystomus (hardwood stump borer), one of the largest (if not the largest) North American Cerambycids. This documented ivorybill prey species has a 3-5 year life-cycle, mostly spent as gregarious larvae within the heartwood of dead and dying trees. Thus, the larvae would be almost exclusively accessible through excavation, not scaling. At bottom is an example of the sycamore excavation in full and in close-up.

There is a typical Pileated Woodpecker trench at the upper right side of the heavily worked area, but the irregularly shaped holes at center are very similar to the ivorybill excavation shown in Tanner’s Plate 11. I wrote a speculative post on the subject of ivorybill excavation almost 9 years ago.

While I have not done a great deal more thinking about the subject, the sycamore work is as Plate 11-like as any excavation I have ever seen; it includes both what Tanner called “slightly conical holes that are usually circular ” and larger holes. Not explicitly stated by Tanner, but visible in Plate 11 and in the sycamore work, is that the larger holes take on a more elongated shape when expanded; these elongated ovals are asymettrical and somewhat skewed in orientation on the trunk. As I wrote in 2014:

One potentially significant element is that the larger holes appear asymmetrical (Tanner notwithstanding) and more skewed in orientation than typical Pileated Woodpecker foraging trenches, which would be consistent with their being dug with more lateral blows.

In 2014, I failed to make it clear that this speculation relates to Campephilus anatomy, which may also account for the more irregular shape of known ivorybill nest cavities compared to pileated nests. Of course, nothing is provable unless and until more examples of documented ivorybill excavation are obtained, but for now, the work on sycamores is intriguing and may be significant.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series.