If you're officially searching for Ivory-bills, encounters with ordinary Pileated and Red-headed Woodpeckers can be very exciting.
This article from South Carolina provides more examples.
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Too bad that Pileated and that Red-headed woodpecker stuck around, or else they could have been two level one sightings of Ivory-Bills. (Only one field mark spotted on each.)
For example: she spotted a big bird, showing its head in and out from behind a tree.
The bird was too far away and the glimpses too quick to allow a good observation, but the top of the flared head sure did look like the distinctive black of the ivory-billed woodpecker, not the red of its more common cousin, the pileated woodpecker.
Had the bird disappeared then, she might have been able to report, "I first knew that it was an Ivory-Bill due to its extreme wariness. There's no way a Pileated would have stayed so far away and warily peaked around the tree at me. I've seen many Pileateds and never saw one behave that way and have never seen one with a black head before." Believers could have verified she was credible, and pointed out there was no way she was lying or delusional.
For the red-headed woodpecker the initial "jizz" must have shouted "large black and white woodpecker that clearly isn't a Pileated. There's no other woodpecker that large with that much white on it!" It could have verified the first sighting, and the suspicious feeding sign, and proven, once again, the extreme wariness of the IBWO, which is why no one in the search team got a photo of one.
Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT get a good look at your Ivory-bill while it is perched, or any good photo of it while flying or perched, or it will turn into an aberrant Pileated or a normal Pileated or a Red-headed woodpecker or a Pintail or possibly a merganser (especially flushing near the water's edge.)
The key in identifying Ivory-Bills is to get brief looks without photos, or brief looks with photos or videos of a blurry enough and/or distant enough nature to allow you and others to see the field marks you're looking for.
“All the ivory-billed that I have seen, I located first by hearing them call and then going to them,” wrote James Tanner, the authority on the birds, in a dissertation in 1937.
Fascinating. I guess this just doesn't work anymore, now that that Ivory-billed woodpeckers have, during their decades under cover, evolved an entirely new set of behaviors.
“All the ivory-billed that I have seen, I located first by hearing them call and then going to them,” wrote James Tanner, the authority on the birds, in a dissertation in 1937."
Or maybe Tanner was no good at finding the birds on his own without his local guides who had already spent years learning where the birds were.
Hey, I can find them in a weekend too if someone who has been tracking them for years leads me to them.
Who finds the birds for the guides?
Hey, I can find them in a weekend too if someone who has been tracking them for years leads me to them.
Gene Sparling has been tracking the AR birds for three years, and he was doing some IBWO guiding, you should hire him: http://www.ivorybilledexpeditions.temp1000.com/index.php?fuseaction=p0004.&mod=13
Anyone heard when Cornell is publishing their paper on that IBWO population and its habits? Although, technically, I suppose they should learn at least one fact before publishing.
Tanner was shown to the birds by the caretaker of the Singer Tract, who lived there and had been keeping track of them for years.
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