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Cornell has new update on this season's search getting underway now, with special emphasis on southwest Florida including mangrove forests from which certain rumors emanated last year; several other key areas of SW Fla. also included as well, as a 7-member 'mobile search team' enters some of the most difficult terrain yet tackled. These searches will go at least through mid-March. Other teams will be searching "eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, southern Illinois, the Florida panhandle, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and east Texas." All these areas have produced various claims/rumors in the last year, except for east Texas from which I've not heard anything very positive recently (but I may have missed something, or else the sheer size of the Big Thicket area may simply require further efforts). Mississippi and South Carolina are singled out for some special emphasis, but clearly that's subject to change.
The update ends as follows:
"The draft recovery plan will be finalized in 2009. In the future, we will focus conservation actions in locations where an active roost or nest is located, or other new information provides a compelling reason to implement additional tasks identified in the recovery plan.
"If no birds are confirmed, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology will not send an organized team into the field next year. 'We remain committed to our original goal of striving to locate breeding pairs,' says Cornell Lab of Ornithology director John Fitzpatrick. 'We will continue to accept and investigate credible reports of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, and to promote protection and restoration of the old growth conditions upon which this magnificent species depended across the entire southeastern United States'.”
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