Final Installment: Trail Cam Deployment and Pileated Woodpecker Hits April-October 2018.

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 […]

Trip Report: October 17-23, 2017

The first trip of the season was relatively uneventful, although we heard possible single and double knocks on Thursday morning and afternoon. Unusually heavy hunting activity and bad weather kept us out of the field on Saturday the 22nd and most of the Sunday the 23rd. Peggy Rardin Shrum joined me from Tuesday through Friday. […]

Bark: An Exegesis

Introduction: According to Tanner, scaling bark was the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s primary foraging strategy during breeding season in Louisiana. Tanner wrote that the ivorybill is “capable of easily scaling away heavy bark that other woodpeckers could not loosen.” (Tanner 1942). All woodpeckers in genus Campephilus have specific anatomical characteristics that enable them to forage in this […]

Scaling Data 2012-2016

To expand on some of the data included toward the end of the March trip report (which is worth reading in in conjunction with this post), I thought it would be informative to provide a season by season and sector by sector breakdown of the scaling I and others involved with Project Coyote have found since […]

Trip Report: May 18-25, 2016

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 […]

Trip Report: March 20-26, 2016

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 […]