Ivorybill Searcher's Forum: Insights and current reports (1 Viewer)

[Jesse Gilsdorf]

Pileated's that eat Carpenter ants supposedly taste pretty bad according to my A C Bent book on Woodpeckers. Nonetheless they were offered for sale on street markets, but the strong formic acid taste rendered them almost non-palatable to the author's (not me nor Bent) tastebuds.
I didn't see anything about IBWO's being shot for food in the A C Bent book
though I seem to recall somewhere it mentioned they had a good flavor.
(an awful thought, I know!).

Paul

My library here in rural- tonia has bird books ca. 1910 that literally refer to "crackers" finding ivory bill "better than duck". If you really really want the cite I could probably get it, but it won't be high on my priority list (sorry).

Jesse

 

[Jesse Gilsdorf]

Question to the field. If IBWO tasted so good, was there a taste for PIWO at the same time? I haven't heard much about PIWO as food while there's quite a bit of chatter about IBWO.

I have had others contact me that said that the pileated in Appalachia, at least, was considered "good eats" with the defining factor being "some eats" would be better than none. One person noted that the Piggly Wiggly was pretty far away. Obviously, if one is hungry pileated may be quite a could looking meal. Although, I truly take my hat off to ANYONE that would eat road kill in the name of science. YOUR A BETTER MAN THAN I, JEROME JACKSON.

Jesse

 

[HASnyder]

Interesting observations on the Sierra Madre Occidental. I haven't been in that part of Mexico and was wondering about the fire regimes.

The northernmost Sierra Madre are the wildest, in terms of lack of human presence. They are within 150 miles of the US border and the most like the so-called "sky islands" of s.e. Arizona and s.w. New Mexico where fire protection has been in place for 90 years or more. Seeing comparable habitat in Mexico makes for a huge 'AHA' moment, when you see what it all should look like. No sign of forest floors clogged with fallen limbs so thick you have to clamber over it. See Joe Marshall's 'Birds of the Pine Oak Woodland' for a good overview of the differences between mountain ranges north and south of the border.

The northernmost Mexico forest areas still have the larger mammals. Access is difficult: the nearest parrot nesting area from my house is 90 air miles from here and a 16-hour drive, 8 hours of which are needed for the last 15 miles.

 

[Jesse Gilsdorf]

I have doubts that any are left. ...

You just don't see much wildlife of any kind in the Sierra - I have seen exactly one bear, one squirrel, one bobcat, and maybe three deer in all those months of field work (in comparable time & habitat in the US I would probably have run into maybe 1 bear/4 months, 1 bobcat/3 weeks, deer and squirrels daily). In the Sierras even birds like jays and robins are pretty scarce, especially in the Tarahumara county around Copper Canyon and farther south.....

I always wonder, I guess hope. When I was a kid a deer was something that was shot in Wisconsin and brought into the Joliet, Illinois area. We lived in a rural community, very small town, and there were still trees and rivers, and the like. (Now that's read as paved over and part of Chicago). Deer in Illinois were generally so scarce that there simply was no hunting for many years and in parts decades (50's 60's). While there were cougars reported more frequently in the Quincy, IL area in the 60's (there are reports today still) they pretty much have died out (the reports that is).

Now turkeys, deer, cougars (to an extant) bobcat, etc. have rebounded very well. I believe in large measure it is due to better land management and the changing of the rural communities from hunting reliant population to an almost non existant one. People here still subsistence hunt, but the number of people doing it is much, much less.

I hold out hope that something like that could happen in Mexico.

How it would happen is another matter.

Jesse

 

[alcedo.atthis]

Returning to the topic, this was released by Cornell today,

A group of researchers is reporting evidence gathered in Florida may
indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Their findings were
published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, September 26,
2006. The search was initiated in May 2005 along the Choctawhatchee River
in the Florida Panhandle after the announcement that at least one
ivory-bill had been documented in Arkansas by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Recovery Team partnership, including the Lab. Though the Florida team did
not obtain definitive visual evidence of ivory-bills, they collected
sound recordings and some sightings. For more details visit
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/current0607/florida. You can also
read more about it on web sites posted by Auburn University in Alabama
and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, where the lead authors
on the scientific paper are based. www.auburn.edu/ivorybill,
www.uwindsor/ivorybill.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology director John Fitzpatrick says the Florida
announcement is a terrific boost. "This is the time to pull out all the
stops. I think the Florida announcement renews the resolve of the
birding and conservation communities at large to get out there and do the
search that's required."

Volunteers Needed for Ivory-bill Search

The call is out for volunteers willing to spend two weeks searching for
the ivory-bill in Arkansas or South Carolina. Volunteers will be
deployed to those areas beginning in January. To learn more about what's
expected, and to file the necessary application, visit the Lab's ivory-bill
pages at www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory. In the coming field season, the
team in Arkansas will focus much of its attention on the White River
National Wildlife Refuge, where much more habitat remains to be searched.

Regards

Malky

 

[Curtis Croulet]

Jackson mentions grilling a piece of a pileated breast from a road-killed bird he was preparing as a museum specimen. He said it wasn't bad.

Probably "tasted like chicken."

Interesting observations on the Sierra Madre Occidental. I haven't been in that part of Mexico and was wondering about the fire regimes.

In Sep 1963 I went with a couple of friends down into Mexico to collect snakes. I was 18 at the time, and, thinking back, I'm astonished that my parents gave the required approval for me to get a tourist card. Anyway, one day we drove from the steaming coast up into the mountains in Durango. It was a world of fog and pines, which I remember being rather park-like, with little or no understory. I wonder now if we should have been on the lookout for Imperial Woodpeckers. None of us were looking for birds -- it was all herps. We also made several shorter trips into Mexico in those years, and once we were subjected to a "shakedown" by local police in Tijuana after making a wrong turn down a one-way street. But worse than that was a humiliating inspection by U.S. agents in San Ysidro. That incident has kept me from ever returning to Mexico except for the 1991 total solar eclipse, which was with a large group.

 

[IBWO_Agnostic]

The northernmost Mexico forest areas still have the larger mammals. Access is difficult: the nearest parrot nesting area from my house is 90 air miles from here and a 16-hour drive, 8 hours of which are needed for the last 15 miles.

And now there's going to be a big old stupid fence really screwing up migration routes for many southwestern critters. Where's Ed Abbey when you need him?

 

[HASnyder]

And now there's going to be a big old stupid fence really screwing up migration routes for many southwestern critters. Where's Ed Abbey when you need him?

The fence will have large gaps in it, one gap being due south of me and maybe 100 miles long (the gap). This gap will be in the area of recent Jaguar activity.

 

[MMinNY]

Is that on the Tohono O'odham Reservation? I heard the fence there would be minimal or non-existent.

The fence will have large gaps in it, one gap being due south of me and maybe 100 miles long (the gap). This gap will be in the area of recent Jaguar activity.

 

[curunir]

Is that on the Tohono O'odham Reservation? I heard the fence there would be minimal or non-existent.

You know, there was also a plan to have a road paralelling the border. Since the border is 1500 miles, I assume that nature was supposed to take care of the rest of the west.

 

[HASnyder]

Is that on the Tohono O'odham Reservation? I heard the fence there would be minimal or non-existent.

Apparently there will be a 75-mile gap there (west of Nogales). There is another gap running from west of Columbus NM to Douglas AZ; this is the one south of me. This story covers some of the issues. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/28/AR2006092800833.html

 

[curunir]

Is that on the Tohono O'odham Reservation? I heard the fence there would be minimal or non-existent.

i think the res is significantly west of helen's area.

 

[fishcrow]

The Mexican coast is beautiful and surprisingly undeveloped for many miles,
especially South of Veracruz. There I found little pockets of woods in the otherwise somewhat dry landscape. In these I found a few of our wintering warblers like Black-Throated Green, and Black and White Warbler.
That said, w.r.t to driving down there... your American plates would be a tipoff. Better to rent a car with no rental car designations on it.
American license plates would cause a lot of hands to go out, and police will
pull you over, take your license and then say in perfect Spanish:
"Of course you have rights here, all citizens have rights. And to show you
that you have rights, I am returning your license. You may choose to refresh me for your generosity!". Then you neatly rollup 20-50 pesos (2-5 dollars) into a small sliver of paper money, and hand it to the officer in a handshake.
He's made a day's wages. But it felt safer in the vast open spaces of the
countryside where people rode by on mule or donkey, and black vultures circled and flapped lazily overhead. Sorry this is a bit off topic but a worthy travel tale that actually happened!

Paul

I once drove across the border and went a ways into Mexico at Brownsville. There were a few requests for "tips," which I didn't mind giving. I rented a car (with Mexican plates) for a week in Yucatan, and it was very different.

 

[lewis20126]

Returning to the topic, this was released by Cornell today,

A group of researchers is reporting evidence gathered in Florida may
indicate the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Their findings were
published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology, September 26,
2006. The search was initiated in May 2005 along the Choctawhatchee River
in the Florida Panhandle after the announcement that at least one
ivory-bill had been documented in Arkansas by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Recovery Team partnership, including the Lab. Though the Florida team did
not obtain definitive visual evidence of ivory-bills, they collected
sound recordings and some sightings. For more details visit
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/current0607/florida. You can also
read more about it on web sites posted by Auburn University in Alabama
and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, where the lead authors
on the scientific paper are based. www.auburn.edu/ivorybill,
www.uwindsor/ivorybill.

A quote from the Cornell site:

"Without even a detailed map of the area, they picked a boat launch along the Choctawhatchee River purely at random and went there the next day. Less than an hour later, Hill says, “We heard something banging in a really solid manner on a tree, up above us in the canopy. We couldn’t see it—all we could hear was this loud banging, loud hammering.” As they moved around to see what was making the noise, a bird took off. Only Rolek saw it, and described white trailing edges on the upper side and underside of black wings, classic ivory-bill plumage. The date: May 21, 2005"

How lucky is that?

 

[cyberthrush]

A quote from the Cornell site:

"Without even a detailed map of the area, they picked a boat launch along the Choctawhatchee River purely at random and went there the next day. Less than an hour later, Hill says, “We heard something banging in a really solid manner on a tree, up above us in the canopy. We couldn’t see it—all we could hear was this loud banging, loud hammering.” As they moved around to see what was making the noise, a bird took off. Only Rolek saw it, and described white trailing edges on the upper side and underside of black wings, classic ivory-bill plumage. The date: May 21, 2005"

How lucky is that?

not altogether lucky (nor altogether random); they had picked the general area due to a previous report(s) of Ivory-bill presence.

 

[Edward woodwood]

must be very, very, lucky as it happened very quickly upon their arrival, and no one is able to replicate the experience... in 2 sq miles...

did Rolek have his blurred bins with him? Or any bins?

and quit the Mexican stereotyping. You sound like you never go abroad.

Tim

 

[fishcrow]

not altogether lucky (nor altogether random); they had picked the general area due to a previous report(s) of Ivory-bill presence.

You want to talk about luck? When I visited the Pearl in Feb. 2000, I found an ivorybill on my negative first day in the field. I arrived the night before and had business at Stennis that morning. I wasn't planning to visit the Pearl to look for the ivorybills until the next day. I arrived at Stennis just after daybreak in order to take a walk in the woods before attending a meeting. I came upon a canal and heard kents on the other side. It was the best audio encounter I have had with this species. The kents were just like the ones in the Singer Tract recordings, and they lasted for a few minutes. This year, I also heard kents similar to some of those recorded in Florida.

 

[Edward woodwood]

I've often bumped into birds i've been searching for very soon after dawn and thought i'd got lucky. Not long afterwards i've realised that i've jumped the gun in all my enthusiasm and had to go back to square one. I have usually found the species eventually, sometimes it's been very hard though.

Incorrect identifications often happen in situations like this. Realising it and resolving to continue are a different matter.

 

[olivacea]

You want to talk about luck? When I visited the Pearl in Feb. 2000, I found an ivorybill on my negative first day in the field.

Mike,

Having a little trouble interpreting this post. I hate to ask how your first positive day in the field went....

 

[Edward woodwood]

It's a daft way of saying the day before his fieldwork started

Tim