Part One: Trip Report October 9-11, 2015 by Frank Wiley

I’ll be posting Frank Wiley’s report on his recent visit to the Project Coyote Search Area in two parts. Below is his account of his first day in the field. I was contacted last month by Bob Ford, a biologist with the USFWS in Tennessee, about a possible visit to the Project Coyote study area […]

Trip Report: April 22-26, 2015

This was a difficult trip on multiple levels. Weather and road conditions prevented me from spending much time in our core search area, and a bad chest cold kept me out of the field almost entirely on the 26th. On that day, all I could manage was a morning, roadside stakeout of an intriguing cavity, […]

Trip Report, Part One: March 31-April 5, 2015

As always, my time in our search area was very productive – inspiring new insights and ideas and producing suggestive but inconclusive evidence that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are present in this location and have been for years. The weather was considerably more cooperative this trip than on the two or three preceding ones, although temperatures edged […]

Trip Report – November 27-30, 2014

Frank Wiley and I have spent the past four days in our search area, beginning on Thanksgiving morning. Before getting into the details, it merits noting that this weekend is the probably the peak of deer season in Louisiana. On Thanksgiving, there were perhaps fifteen or twenty people hunting on the edges of the habitat […]

Sweet Gums to Sweet Gums and More

In this post, I compared scaling on sweet gums in our search area with images of scaling on sweet gums taken by Martjan Lammertink in Congaree National Park; he has graciously granted me permission to post those images and some others here. The focus of the original post was on the direct comparison between known […]

Apples to Apples and Sweet Gums to Sweet Gums

I’ve been corresponding with Mississippi-based searcher Christopher Carlisle both privately and on Facebook, and our conversations have inspired some additional thoughts on bark scaling and led me to revisit Cornell’s 2006-2007 final report, which includes two interesting photos of Pileated Woodpecker work on sweet gums taken by Martjan Lammertink in Congaree National Park. I was familiar […]