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 […]
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 […]
1967 slides taken by Neal Wright of a putative Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Texas are viewable on Vireo (search Ivory-billed Woodpecker), but high resolution scans have not been widely circulated as far as I know. These images were not made public until after the the Arkansas “rediscovery”, more than three decades after they were obtained. Wright’s story […]
In late December 2014, I wrote what I’ve described as a speculative post titled, “Is There a Way to Recognize Ivory-billed Woodpecker Excavation? In that post, I relied on Tanner’s Plate 11, a brief description from the monograph: “When Ivory-bills dig, they chisel into the sap and heartwood for borers like other woodpeckers, digging slightly […]
I’m planning to do a few more posts drawing on material I’ve found in Kroch Library’s Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell. There may be an intervening post or two on other topics. While Tanner’s monograph is well-known, the reports he wrote for the Audubon Society at the end of each season are not publicly […]
These two photographs, taken by Tanner in 1938 and published in his dissertation, have not been otherwise widely disseminated or (to the best of my knowledge) reprinted elsewhere. Each is interesting in its own right, and not just because they add to the small body of indisputable ivorybill imagery; the first shows the behavior of […]
My visits to Cornell’s Kroch Library, where the Rare and Manuscript Collections are housed, have been very productive. In addition to the last letter to Tanner pertaining to the Singer Tract ivorybills quoted at length here, I’ve come across several little known ivorybill images, some better quality reproductions of the plates in Tanner, […]
Here is the relevant part of a January 8, 1949 letter to Tanner from a former student, Arthur MacMurray, who visited the Singer Tract in December, 1948. Jackson references the letter, and a brief excerpt is included in this history of the Singer Tract, but I think the discussion of ivorybills is worth reading in […]
Part 1 is here. The second observation from the Singer Tract I want to discuss took place in May 1932, when Audubon Society President, T. Gilbert Pearson and Audubon Sanctuary Director Ernest G. Holt were the first ornithologists to observe Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (a minimum of three separate individuals) on the Singer Tract. As discussed in […]
Although it is thematically quite different, this series of posts is rooted in my recent reexamination of my feeding sign hypothesis that culminates here. It was also inspired by my recent and much closer look at Tanner and the Singer Tract, new insights gleaned from old material, and the input of others that shaped the […]
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