As most readers know, I have been very focused on feeding sign, and specifically on bark scaling, for several years and believe I have identified a diagnostic type of work that is beyond the physical capacity of any other woodpecker species. I have been far less focused on excavation because I was convinced that there was […]
I’ve been playing around with Topaz photo editing software. I’m a total neophyte and did not track all the steps I took to modify this image from 2009, discussed here, but I think that what I did eliminated some artifacts, specifically the apparent red in the crest of the bird. These pictures were taken in August, […]
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 […]
In a 1936 letter to James Tanner before Tanner began his survey of possible ivorybill habitat in the southeast, Herbert Stoddard wrote, “The area where they (Ivory-billed Woodpeckers) may occur at present is simply tremendous, not restricted as many believe.” Stoddard continued, “. . . if I had the rest of my life for the […]
When I began blogging on WordPress, I mentioned that I’d be posting sound clips from our old search area that were available on the old Project Coyote site, but I’ve been somewhat undecided about it and wasn’t sure I could track down all the material, a problem I’ve now solved. The most interesting audio was […]
As many readers of this blog are aware, I’ve been actively searching for ivorybills since 2007 and have been obsessed with foraging sign and cavities since my first days in the field. Over the years, I’ve looked at bark scaling and cavities both in and out of suspected ivorybill territory and have developed and refined […]
I have been corresponding with Christopher Carlisle, a Mississippi birder who has recently started searching for ivorybills in the Pascagoula watershed. These exchanges, along with a post on IBWO.net about the Choctawhatchee, led me to start thinking, in a somewhat more methodical fashion, about habitat conditions and how the ivorybill might have survived and to […]
A couple have people have written to say they’re having difficulty hearing the calls on the raw clips from March 2, 2013. I’m posting an amplified version of the morning first clip. The clarinet toots and rustling will be quite loud, but the calls are definitely much easier to hear. In addition to the calls […]
For those who missed them, I thought I’d repost these images from 2010. The bark chip is from the old Project Coyote search area.
Late last June, I collected several beetles and larvae from a suspected feeding tree in our search area. An entomologist has identified one of the adult specimens as Hesperandra (or Parandra) polita. All the adults were the same species, and we presume that the larvae were as well, although we were not able to preserve […]
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