Part One: Trip Report October 9-11, 2015 by Frank Wiley

I’ll be posting Frank Wiley’s report on his recent visit to the Project Coyote Search Area in two parts. Below is his account of his first day in the field. I was contacted last month by Bob Ford, a biologist with the USFWS in Tennessee, about a possible visit to the Project Coyote study area […]

Trip Report – November 27-30, 2014

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 […]

Sweet Gums to Sweet Gums and More

In this post, I compared scaling on sweet gums in our search area with images of scaling on sweet gums taken by Martjan Lammertink in Congaree National Park; he has graciously granted me permission to post those images and some others here. The focus of the original post was on the direct comparison between known […]

Cavity Comparison

In late 2011, I visited the Museum of Natural History at Harvard and took some iPhone photos of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker nest that’s on display there. In reviewing the pictures of cavities I took last week in Louisiana, I was struck by the similarity in appearance, especially between the Harvard cavity and the cavity in […]

Known Ivory-billed Woodpecker Prey

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 […]

Distribution of Feeding Sign

There may be some value in considering the distribution of the particular type of suspected Ivory-billed Woodpecker foraging sign that I’ve discussed in my recent posts. For the purposes of this analysis, I will limit myself to one very narrow category of bark scaling: extensive work done on the boles of live or recently dead […]