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Having grown up in central Illinois I’ve long thought that both southern Illinois and southeast Missouri were actual possibilities for the IBWO, despite low attention paid to such locales (...and Bill Pulliam made us aware of western Tennessee as well).
Louisiana searcher Matt Courtman reports on one of the Facebook IBWO group pages that he will be searching in the S. Illinois area (which is part of the Cache River watershed) on Friday, November 6 (if he’s literally devoting just one day, not sure how extensive a look he'll get, but no doubt a fun area to explore and spend a day, with or without the prize).
He links to this 2010 'technical' paper from Jeff Hoover on the region/habitat:
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17081/INHS2010_29.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
In some other side news, someone else at the same FB group has mentioned the 2018 discovery of the Wondiwoi tree-kangaroo (previously assumed long-extinct). Almost every year it seems some believed-extinct creature is re-discovered, and I don’t usually bother mentioning such news, except that in this case it is a relatively large, strictly tree-dwelling animal, confined to small remote areas… hmmmm… sound familiar? I’ve hypothesized in the past that the difficulty of IBWO documentation may be that, over time, the species has become a largely arboreal bird (in remote areas) rarely coming down low or to the ground, and essentially remaining out-of-human-sight most of the time.
A couple of bits on the kangaroo here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wondiwoi_tree-kangaroo
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