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'Helter skelter in the summer swelter...' Rumors of Ivory-bill reports continue to dribble in from multiple areas even through the hot, steamy summer months, when it helps to be just a tad crazy to even be out there looking. MUCH habitat remains in need of thorough checking -- not as large and extensive in many cases as one would like, more fragmented than would be ideal, but nonetheless potential habitat. The early-on notion that Ivory-bills required virgin forest for survival simply lacks any necessary proof, as if the first thing a bird does upon entering a patch of woods is to ask, "let me see, are you a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd-growth tree?" Most of the animals, and all of the other woodpeckers, of the early American woodland adapted as needed when America's virgin forests declined. Adaptation, far more than specialization-to-the-point-of-extinction, represents the history and nature of living things in general. When the Ivory-bill is documented (in multiple locales probably) cries of "miracle," "incredible," "mind-boggling," will go up across the land in many quarters, though there will be nothing unusual about it, no miracles involved, just creatures doing what they have done for millennia, whilst Mankind falsely assumes that he knows and understands all there is of relevance worth knowing and understanding.
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