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 […]

A Tantalizing Trail Cam Capture

Best laid plans . . . I’m pushing back the posts on historic range and evidence but hope to get to them soon. In going through some of the remaining unexamined images from past trail cam deployments, Geoffrey McMullan came across an intriguing image. He sent me the file for the entire day without indicating […]

Wake Feeding on a Hickory?

This is my 100th post on the blog. On the weekend of March 4-5, Phil Vanbergen visited the search area and changed out the card on our deployed trail cam. He found that Pileateds had hit the target tree, scaling a single and large strip of bark during one of several visits. The raw sequence […]

Hickory Scaling

Yesterday, Phil Vanbergen visited the search area and found fresh scaling of the kind I think is diagnostic for Ivory-billed Woodpecker on a hickory. This is an exciting development because we found no fresh work of this type last season. While Phil was unable to get to the base of the tree to examine the […]

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 […]