It’s one of the most exotic and the most inhospitable environments in America, a vast primordial ooze, a place so wild, that the Big Woods have been called this country’s Amazon.Ok, the Big Woods isn't small, but let's not get carried away. According to this link, the Amazon's total drainage basin is about 2.7 million square miles in size. The Big Woods of Arkansas is about 860 (.00086 million) square miles in size. In terms of square miles, South America's Amazon is over 3,000 times larger than "our Amazon".
A reader with experience in southern swamps emailed me this:
My wife and I have been giggling about all the accounts of how horrible, difficult, dangerous, and remote these swamps are. Again as you note, hunters and fisherman (many of the big-fat-bubba sort) go into these places all the time in large numbers.Bobby Harrison called the Bayou DeView sighting area "a narrow strip of swamp that spanned only half a mile in its widest spots".
This year's searchers will be working mostly via "day trips" into the swamp, rather than journeying for days into the middle of nowhere. If you can paddle in, do some searching, and paddle out each day, I wouldn't describe your search area as "vast" or "inaccessible".
Another point to remember is that Cornell's "Ivory-bill" sightings were not evenly distributed throughout the Big Woods--they were tightly clustered in a four-square-kilometer area. Coincidentally, in this same small area, abnormal Pileateds were seen and photographed.
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