report from White River NWR
I had never been in this area before, the river system surprised me, I was expecting to find a lazy, meandering river surrounded by cypress/tupelo swamp. Instead I found a powerful river with steep cutbanks, much like the Atchafalaya in Louisiana. The surrounding floodplain is not dominated by cypress swamp, but is overwhelmingly bottomland hardwood forest. I don't know what led Jackson to dismiss this area as potential ivory-bill habitat, there is not much sweet gum here, but there are many large Nuttall and overcup oaks and some huge sycamores. There are also some beautiful big cypress trees along sloughs, I saw trees 7-8 feet in diameter. Covered a lot of ground, spent many hours in some of the more remote parts of the refuge, saw a lot of scaled trees but nothing that I could say definitely wasn't the work of pileateds. Didn't see anything that looked like the scaling Luneau photographed, which tells me that that is indeed rare and probably ivory-bill work.
Saw few birders, lots of fishermen. The refuge seems to be heavily used by hunters and fishermen. ATV trails are common. I swung up to the Cache River NWR/Dagmar WMA area, where Elvis was seen, just briefly, long enough to confirm that the forest there is generally less mature than that to the south and much more fragmented.
I feel certain that a small breeding population of ivory-bills lives in White River NWR and adjacent lands. There are many thousands of acres of unbroken mature forest here. It is easy for the birds to escape detection because the areas of heavy human activity are very predictable. It is hard enough to see a black bear; I have seen an estimate that there is one per 300 acres on parts of the refuge.
There is every reason to hope that ivory-bills will persist and increase in the area. But they will be very difficult to census and study.
