-- Old Mystery -- +Addendum

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Again today will do exactly what I wished to avoid doing, which is replay or rehash old material, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything new and significant coming down the pike.... except more and more and more Pileated pictures :(( (...already put this on a Facebook page, where Don Scheifler had brought it up, but since so many have abandoned FB and Mark Zuckerberg’s clutches, you may not have seen it there). 

Close to a dozen years ago Don was unearthing various old IBWO-related documents when one was particularly interesting or cryptic — the above letter from a James McClellan mentioning Ivory-bills on private timber land in 1967. That set me off on a wild goose chase that was never resolved but I covered in these 4 postings a dozen years ago (still interesting, and just maybe, perhaps, possibly someone out there does know, as Paul Harvey would've said, the rest of the story -- WAS a population of IBWOs being protected by timber operators in the late 1960s? verrrry unlikely, but who knows):

https://ivorybills.blogspot.com/2013/05/houston-files.html

https://ivorybills.blogspot.com/2013/06/speculatin.html

https://ivorybills.blogspot.com/2013/06/follow-up.html

https://ivorybills.blogspot.com/.../what-did-they-know...

And the below letter from Harry Goodwin of USFWS is what initiated the above letter:

Thanks again to Don for originally finding and sharing all this....

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ADDENDUM:  To add to the murkiness, I’ll just add this quote from the USFWS “Draft Recovery Plan” which someone sent me back at the time to contend that USFWS simply never verified any IBWO presence on private timberland company grounds:

“In the early 1970’s Sam Houston National Forest in east Texas proposed to modify timber harvests based on three unconfirmed Ivory-billed Woodpecker sightings by their staff (Ruediger 1971). These and other sightings in east Texas were never widely accepted and, consequently, did not stimulate forest management changes to promote the welfare of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Similar stories of unconfirmed sightings have generated no change in land management throughout the southeast. “

I still don’t know what to believe…. perhaps this 1970s' finding doesn’t actually apply to McClellan’s 1967 reference, or for the conspiracy-minded, maybe (though I doubt it) USFWS is covering its own tracks and not wanting to grant the public any knowledge of 1960s' IBWOs. Also possible (I believe) that there have always been 2 schools of thought within USFWS re: IBWOs, one far more skeptical, and one leaning more open or even optimistic to the possibility of IBWOs…. and depending who is writing something up the words may slant one way or the other. So I'm still left hanging, though it is simply hard to imagine any way that timber companies could have been protecting multiple confirmed IBWOs in the 1960s and word of it never leaked to the gossipy birding community ;) (that's the problem with all conspiracy theories is that people TALK!)