-- Hope, Fading and Springing --

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Trying not to be too speculative here these days, but with another lull in news, will go ahead and be a little what-iffy ;)

One would like to believe that some of the most promising places for Ivory-bills like the Congaree, the Apalachicola, the Atchafalaya, the Big Thicket, are simply so huge, dense, and difficult to traverse, that despite the many man-hours of unsuccessful searching devoted to them over decades, the species’ presence there can never be fully discounted. Especially so, if the species is wary, a fast flyer, and certainly few in number; it could evade detection even when in a searcher’s near-presence. Maybe. Still, odd that remote automatic cameras have failed to capture them, and that even fleeting glances or auditory encounters have been so few and hard to replicate, and not a single active roost or nest-hole found in all that time. Perhaps the species has truly disappeared from such places long ago (except for an occasional fly-through), and too much time has been wasted concentrating on such regions. Maybe.

Even if such locales are devoid of IBWOs there’s always the hope that over the decades individual birds may have moved on to historically less well-established (or seriously-considered) locations such as Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, et. al., where searching has been much less rigorously conducted.

I mention all this because of a recent posting over at the “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Rediscovered” Facebook group that linked to an old (well, 2017) piece on Michael Collins’ work — I hadn’t re-looked at it since it came out, so only recently discovered all the comments added to it, including several claimed sightings for the species. The sightings claims are more of what one typically finds across the Internet — not terribly credible, nor including the sort of detail one would like, and almost never with photos (or when there are pictures, clearly of a Pileated).  Nonetheless, one FB responder picked out one Tennessee claim as interesting, which read verbatim as follows:

“In 1991 I was turkey hunting and had the sighting of a lifetime. For at least 20 minutes a hen ivorybill worked on a old tree and flew down to a rotten log and caught bugs no more than 25 yards from me. I am 100% certain of what she was and would take a polygraph or be hypnotized to prove it. I am very familiar with pileateds and she was not, black and white head and lots of white on the wings. The kicker is where she was. Clinch Mountain valley, near Cherokee lake in TN. Not supposed to be here, but knew several old folks who saw them.I have seen 2 or 3 since, but never that long and good of a sighting. Any biologist that wants to look for themselves I would help any way I could.”

Again, I wouldn’t place too much weight on the claim, except that it did remind me of a story writer Sam Keen told in his book “Sightings” many years ago — a childhood story from 1942, of living in Pikeville, TN. (eastern TN.) and being present when an Ivory-billed Woodpecker was shot and killed (he couldn’t absolutely confirm that it was an IBWO, only that the adults he was with at the time claimed it was one). Clinch Mountain Valley is perhaps an hour or two further east (from Pikeville); neither locale with any significant history of IBWO claims or searches.

When USFWS/Cornell did their large Southeast search for the Ivory-bill they only suggested a few locales in the far western edge of Tennessee as being worth any time (because of a few claims and the habitat). Excellent Tennessee birder Bill Pulliam (now deceased) also left hints about the possibility of IBWO presence in far western TN. I was never able to get a straight answer from him as to whether he honestly believed IBWO were there, or merely thought it fell within the realm of outside possibility, though I think it was more the latter case (I always thought that perhaps after his death, if he truly believed in IBWO existence in his state, something in his papers or writing might have been found to back that up). 

Anyway, the western edge of TN. borders on the southeast corner of Missouri, the southern tip of Illinois, and the northeast edge of Arkansas (near the 'Big Woods' area), all oddball locales for which I’ve heard occasional rumors of IBWOs over the decades. (Kentucky, southern Indiana, Oklahoma, and certainly parts of Alabama, Georgia, and perhaps N. Carolina, not usually associated with traditional range maps for IBWO, have also produced rumors/claims from time-to-time.) But of course no one is going to look much in these places without stronger evidence to lead them there. Is it like the old joke of the fellow looking for his keys under the lamp-post where the light is, instead of where he lost them a block away? The acreage of southern woodland that is not regularly monitored, nor even very accessible, is enormous... 

Unfortunately, I’m going in circles here, in that I’ve discussed this possibility in the distant past — that perhaps we’ve spent most of our time, spinning our wheels, searching in all the wrong places (based upon false assumptions); places that have already been scoured many times over, and the birds have moved on to further locales, not part of (but adjacent to) their older, traditional range? IF the species is EVER found and documented it may be astounding to discover how much we've gotten wrong over the decades! That's a big IF, but

hope springs eternal….

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