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 […]
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’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 […]
I recorded this today in the northern sector. The first sound is Frank Wiley’s double knock with cypress dowels on a tree. The response comes approximately nine seconds later. There was no human activity in the vicinity at the time, and the spectrogram makes it clear that the source is natural. The intra-knock interval appears […]
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 […]
Late last year, I wrote a post entitled “More Minutiae – Habitat Quality and Population Density in the Singer Tract”. I had to follow up with a couple of corrections and elaborations based on insights others shared with me. In the interest of providing more clarity and coherence, I thought I’d do a new piece […]
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 […]
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