In recent weeks, some people have argued that "bark scaling" in Arkansas was evidence of Ivory-bills. I don't think that argument holds much water.
There's an interesting snippet here:
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Team Elvis has detected intriguing bark scaling in the White River refuge. But they’ve also seen, thanks to a motion-triggered camera aimed at a scaled tree, bug-hunting pileateds creating much the same damage. From a 6-by-6-foot platform along the bayou north of the Highway 17 bridge, Mel White, one of Arkansas’s premier birders and a volunteer searcher, watched a pileated “on a horizontal branch of a tupelo peel off strips of bark about 9 inches long.”
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Here are some "remote camera" pictures of Pileateds at sites with intriguing bark scaling.
Tuesday
2 hours ago