Insights, Ants, and Old Growth: a Nuanced View of the Ivorybill’s Decline and Possible Survival

I’ve just finished reading Tanner’s dissertation and have gained some new insights into topics that have been discussed in a number of earlier posts. Conventional wisdom, following Tanner, holds that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker’s decline and possible extinction were caused by habitat loss, specifically the logging of old growth forests during the 19th and early 20th […]

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: 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 […]

Known Ivory-billed Woodpecker Prey

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 […]