-- An Old Where-to-Look List --

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Jim Tate's recent death had me thinking of a few others we've lost in recent years. So just a “filler” post today, directing folks to an old “Top Ten” nicely-annotated list of Bob Russell’s favorite possible spots for Ivory-bills (which includes 6 different states):

https://web.archive.org/web/20070202060553/www.birdingamerica.com/toptenibwpsites.htm

This list was originally on Mary Scott’s wonderful old “Birding America” website in 2006 — long since disappeared into the internet ether, but still available from the archival “Wayback” machine. (She and Bob searched for the Lord God Bird together on several occasions. Tim Gallagher's "The Grail Bird" volume has a nice chapter on some of their endeavors.)

Several readers here had encounters with Bob over the years. He was a former USFWS employee and eternal IBWO optimist, who died almost 5 years ago. I always enjoyed any correspondence coming from him and his upbeat, almost infectious, enthusiasm about the Ivory-bill’s chances (…he also searched actively for the Eskimo Curlew). Indeed, he was so upbeat I sometimes found it hard to take his enthusiasm completely seriously, but he was a very skilled/knowledgeable searcher and birder, with perhaps the most extensive compilation of IBWO claims and rumors possessed by anyone! And he was touting Arkansas’ White River area before anyone had ever heard of Gene Sparling….

A couple of years after Mary published the above list, Bob promised me he had a new ‘updated’ list he’d be sending along to me…. but it never materialized, despite me nudging him on a couple of occasions about it, so don’t know what his latest ideas had been (I think he was continually changing his mind about some locales.). And the problem with the above listing is that it is very largely places that have been mentioned and written about frequently over decades, and somewhat combed by searchers extensively over time, at least in so much as such locales can ever be “combed.” Perhaps, by now it is primarily NOT these 10 spots that deserve a lot more attention (for example the specific area of Project Principalis’s focus is not included here, nor was the Choctawhatchee on this early listing), but other, less talked-of areas. At the end, Bob more-or-less writes off Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and North Carolina — and, well, in all of that dismissal I’d have to credit him with too much uncharacteristic pessimism! 

If anyone cares to pass along any anecdotes of interactions with Bob (or for that matter with Mary Scott, who has disappeared from the scene) feel free to below. 

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