-- Just The Beginning --

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One thing I've found interesting over the course of the last year is the number of backwoods/swamper types who have come out of the Arkansas' Big Woods area (either on their own, or as part of the Cornell team) to say that the Big Woods is nowhere near as remote or dense or impenetrable as implied early on by Cornell, and that there were far more genuinely inhospitable bottomland/swamp areas elsewhere through the South. Whether Cornell intentionally painted an especially harsh picture of the Big Woods in order to dissuade large numbers of weekend birders from rushing down there, or whether the initial Cornell crew was simply too inexperienced with deep swamp habitat to recognize truly difficult and inaccessible woodland from more mediocre landscape, I don't know. But what is clear by now is that the Big Woods isn't the end-of-the-line of areas needing searching... rather, it is barely a beginning.
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