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 […]
I’d like to address an interesting post from “Sidewinder” on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Researchers’ Forum on the rapid evolution question. His key points: “Cyberthrush and others have suggested that natural selection has favored high levels of wariness and human avoidance in the IBWO. This position assumes that the change has a genetic rather than experiential […]
As many readers of this blog are aware, I’ve been actively searching for ivorybills since 2007 and have been obsessed with foraging sign and cavities since my first days in the field. Over the years, I’ve looked at bark scaling and cavities both in and out of suspected ivorybill territory and have developed and refined […]
I have been corresponding with Christopher Carlisle, a Mississippi birder who has recently started searching for ivorybills in the Pascagoula watershed. These exchanges, along with a post on IBWO.net about the Choctawhatchee, led me to start thinking, in a somewhat more methodical fashion, about habitat conditions and how the ivorybill might have survived and to […]
Note: Based on thousands of hours of reviewing and analyzing field recordings, I now think these sounds are squirrel vocalizations. In my experience, Eastern grey squirrels are the most challenging confusion species, both in the field and on sonograms. Modest attenuation by distance can make them sound quite ivorybill like, and fundamental frequencies can sometimes […]
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 […]
I returned to the Project Coyote search area from January 4-11 and was joined by Frank Wiley for all but one day, Steve Pagans (a retired forester, birder, and Project Coyote team member) for two days, and several ornithologists/field biologists between January 7-11. Some of our guests had intriguing auditory encounters, several of which involved […]
Last week I linked to this image and pointed out that the caption described it as the “Third ivorybills’ nest”. That discovery sent me back to the online archives. What I found raises some interesting questions about the Singer Tract, the population density of ivorybills, at least around John’s Bayou in 1935, and about habitat quality […]
In searching Cornell University’s online digital archives, I ran across some IBWO related photographs from the 1935 Allen/Kellogg/Tanner expedition in the Albert Rich Brand collection. Many of these pictures are familiar and have been widely published. Others are likely to be new, even to the most obsessive researchers, since Brand was a relatively less celebrated […]
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