Jamie Hill, who has worked with the Cornell and Auburn teams, recently posted a Facebook link to a very interesting article from the September 2014 issue of Smithsonian. Ivory-billed Woodpecker aside, the piece is well worth reading, but for the purposes of this blog, the article got me thinking about reasons for the ivorybill’s decline and […]
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, […]
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 […]
About our Guest blogger: Greg Links Biggest Week Field Trip Leader Greg has lived in and birded Northwest Ohio since the age of 7. He has served as President, Vice President, Field Trips Chairman and Rare Bird Alert Compiler for the Toledo Naturalists’ Association, one of the largest, longest-standing and most respected Ohio nature clubs. […]
Note: this is a very image-heavy post, and most of them appear ‘below the fold’. Although we faced significant challenges during this trip, it was nonetheless a very productive one. I was joined by John Henry, the photographer who was with me when I recorded kent-like calls in March 2013. Work obligations kept Frank Wiley […]
I thought I’d address a couple of comments from ibwo.net written in response to the recent post on sightings and evidence from 1944-2003. Duck Stamp reminded me that Lewis’s story and identity were revealed in Tim Gallagher’s The Grail Bird, and Houston pointed out John Fitzpatrick’s discussion of the images in a presentation on the rediscovery. As far […]
This post is inspired in large part by an exchange of emails with Chris Sharpe, an ornithologist who is working on an IBWO literature review. Our correspondence revolved around the IUCN’s species account, which describes the ivorybill as “possibly extinct” and cites recent statistical analyses that suggest extinction is likely, as well as one that […]
I have been re-reading George Lamb’s 1957 report on the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker. A number of items struck me as potentially significant for North American searchers, some for how they diverge from Tanner and others for their level of detail. Since this report is likely unfamiliar to many, I thought I’d do a quick post […]
I’ll be returning to Louisiana in late February and hope to make a couple of more trips during peak search season. Frank has retrieved the cards from our game cams and is in the process of going through several weeks of images. In contrast to the last set, there have been no intriguing hits thus […]
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 […]
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