Two weeks ago, Frank went into the hospital. About two days after admission, he was taken to the ICU with a systemic infection. He started showing signs of improvement on Monday this week and was able to go off the ventilator as of yesterday. (I was there from Tuesday 1/24-Tuesday 1/31.) I know Frank to be […]
Part 1 of this report is here. Patricia opted to take the day off on the 19th, so I went out on my own and covered a lot of territory. I had been thinking hard about the hickories and the fact that, in virtually all cases, we’ve seen indications that bark is removed from these […]
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 […]
I’ve created a page that expands on this post and should provide a good introduction to our thinking about the three most intriguing types of feeding sign, with images from the second and third categories. Think of this post as the shorter version. Over the years, I have written a great deal about bark scaling […]
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 […]
As usual, much of this report will be focused on bark scaling. I found an unprecedented amount of fresh work this trip, a total of 29 trees, all sweet gums. I only counted live and freshly dead trees that appeared to have been scaled within the last year, and probably more recently than that, in […]
I flew into Houston on February 4 and arrived at the search area on the morning of the 5th. Frank’s work schedule had precluded him from returning to the search area during my absence, and he was unable to get time off to join me this trip. Tommy Michot visited on the February 5th; we […]
The first two installments in this series, which was inspired by the discovery that squirrels are doing some of the bark scaling in our search area, are here and here. This installment will consider the appearance of the scaling itself, and the next will focus on pieces of bark; “chips” no longer feels sufficient to describe […]
I made the mistake of trying to save on flights (actually paid with miles this trip), flying out of LaGuardia and a change of planes in Dallas. I left New York with a bad cold, and the first leg of the trip was miserable. Little did I know that the second leg would be worse. […]
This is will be the first in a series of 3-4 posts. The subject is multifaceted and subtle. Nuances can be hard to convey in words and accompanying illustrations; it’s easier to do in talks, with bark chips in hand to provide a more visceral sense of what’s being described. Still, it seems important to […]
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