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Sorry for long news-less spell but just not catching drift of any new significant information that isn’t readily available on the Web (and the occasional non-credible tweet of an Ivorybill sighting on Twitter doesn’t cut it ;).
Anyway, a long-time IBWO seeker retired from USFWS, informs me he'll be leading a small group to several key areas of La. over upcoming weeks, and is also giving the Big Cypress and Myakka River areas in Florida another look.
Wouldn’t get expectations too high, but at least good to know that some additional serious searching will take place early in the year, when leaves are off the trees and any remaining IBWOs ought be actively out-and-about seeking mates, courting, nesting, carrying on, and basically easier to spot (and photograph!) than at any other time of year.
I occasionally hear from folks who are spending a 3-day weekend somewhere looking for IBWO, but if anyone else is doing some more extensive independent searching over the winter months and wants to let me know, feel free to drop a line with whatever details you're willing to share (even if you're unsuccessful I'm interested to know what areas are even getting any attention these days).
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ADDENDUM for proprietors of the IBWO Researchers’ Forum site & anyone having difficulty accessing that site:
Recently I discovered slightly more info on my year-long difficulty accessing the IBWO Forum site (probably 9 out of 10 attempts with either Safari or Firefox browsers fail for me; Chrome used to be equally bad, but recently succeeds slightly more often). Anyway, I recently dug a little further on Chrome after getting the message that there was “No page information” for the Forum site and got these further messages:
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“It means that the website prevented Google from creating a page description, but didn't actually hide the page from Google.If you own this page you can improve this result either by letting Google read the page to create a good description, or hiding the page entirely from Google Search results. Read below to learn how.
The page owner partially blocked this page from Google, so we couldn't create a good page description. Unfortunately there's nothing that we can do ourselves. If you know the site owners, tell them they are blocking Google with a robots.txt file, which prevents Google from creating a page snippet.”
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So apparently some sort of robots.txt file is the root of the problem (though I don’t know how easy that is to locate?); have also recently realized that the Forum site is still under a http:// url listing rather than the https://. that is now commonplace (I don’t know if that is a source of any difficulty?). And still not clear to me why access might differ from one computer to another, or from one ISP provider to another???
Anyway, after reading the above, I brought up the Bing search engine (instead of Google), searched for “ibwo.net” on it and when it was brought up clicked on it, and that accessed the site for me! (I tried some other search engines, but they didn’t immediately work consistently, while Bing worked fairly well) — probably worth trying for anyone else having repeated difficulties with access to ibwo.net
