Nancy recalls her last visit [to the Singer Tract], in 1941, when they counted 9 ivorybills, though she saw only five. Just a few years later The Singer Tract was logged and the birds disappeared.Very late in the game, when there were maybe two dozen birds left, they were still not very difficult to see. Their nests were largely failing, their habitat was about to be destroyed, and evidently they were still no more wary than a Pileated Woodpecker.
Is it reasonable to believe that shortly afterwards, the remaining birds inexplicably managed an unprecedented quantum leap in wariness?
According to Nancy Tanner, Richard Pough, one of the last visitors to The Singer Tract to see the birds, was there as it was being logged. His encounter with a lone female ivorybill who kept calling and calling, but got no answer, moved him to pledge to save the wilderness. He later helped in the founding of The Nature Conservancy.So even the very last known bird was a vocal one. Is it reasonable to believe that at that time, there existed another completely undocumented population of nonvocal birds?
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4 comments:
It's not very encouraging news that with each passing day there is still no "verified" sighting.
Judging by what Mrs. Tanner said the IBWO wasn't all that elusive and if anything a lone bird would be that much more easy to spot.
I might be wrong but wouldn't it be vocalizing and flying around more in search of a mate? Which leads me to question why there are no reports of a female IBWO in the area?
Maybe that lone male bird has flown the proverbial coop. I know I would.
Is it reasonable to believe that shortly afterwards, the remaining birds inexplicably managed an unprecedented quantum leap in wariness?
Possible, yes. Reasonable, no.
Any other creature that I'm aware of that hasn't been hunted for 60+ years gets LESS wary of man. Like elk in Yellowstone, for example.
Well I'd have to assume that any photos of any sightings might be suppressed until after the nesting season. At this point the IBW's would be setting up their territories, according to the historical record.
So evidence presented now could be used by a 'collector' to locate a nesting pair, offspring, etc.
Unless someone has the inside track on Cornell evidence timelines.
I doubt any new evidence will be
presented until the breeding season is past (if of course, it really exists!).
Of course somewhere there would have to be a place where a larger number of these birds exists than just the one sighted. And that is a major sticking point. Yet I do find it equally weird that it was assumed that Tanner found the last colony
of these birds in the country and
no, there couldn't possibly have been another one. That lone 1944 female was the very last bird,
though conceivably she could have
lived until the early 50s.
Only the Singer Tract held IBWs by the 1930s? Even when John V Dennis who photographed IBWs in Cuba in the 50s... said he saw a pair in the Big Thicket of Texas in 1968... and saw and heard them for 15 minutes...
He was roundly criticized (although many did search the Big Thicket with no luck). Here was a guy who knew the Cuban bird quite well yet it was assumed that he couldn't possibly
have seen an IBW in 1968 by many
experts.
It does stretch credulity that the birds could have survived so long undetected and continued to breed for what must be 20 generations since 1944.
Yet the final date of 1944 is also
something that is taken as gospel.
I've been in the woods quite a bit and never seen a 'wrecked' (dead) pileated woodpecker.
As for old growth trees being big.
Yes the old Chestnuts would grow quite wide, but I've also been to old-growth forests where the trees were only large where access to light produced the opportunity to grow large (wide) instead of tall.
Yet I only know the northern woods.
(now quite snowy!).
When I hear that the whole area is
maybe only as big as Rhode Island...
ever driven across RI in heavy traffic? It can take hours!
But the absence of news does not imply there's been nothing new.
I could argue both sides until my
carpal tunnel says "stop" :-).
Paul - New Paltz, NY
Paul's right - there does seem to be an unspoken assumption that Singer represented the last existing population. My guess? There were more, but they were snuffed out between the 40's-60's. The flip side of that is the question as to whether the Cache/White area was remotely suitable when those populations were still viable. In my own area, there are a lot of former agricultural/timber areas that were denuded through cotton production between the 40's-60's. When cotton was no longer commercially viable here, those fields began reverting to forest. Is that what happened in Cache/White? Were the areas in question actually timber-free? I don't know its history. Are we looking at a scenario in which we have to assume that the IBWOs weren't @ Cache continuously from the 40's to today? Did they somehow "leap-frog" from one suitable habitat pocket to another, as each was destroyed in turn, until they arrived at Cache? Can someone clarify what the history is there? It looks as if it was probably logged in at least the last half of the century. (Yeah, at first glance you might disagree; however, to look at much of the Okefenokee NWR, you wouldn't realize that it was almost entirely clearcut from the 1900's-1930's. )
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