2009 Tally Ho!

Big white birds!

January 12, 2009

I had just crossed the county line from Obion to Dyer on Highway 51 when I caught the two big glowing shapes in a large borrow pit off to my right. A couple of swans, it seemed. Something about the scene just said "Trumpeters" to me even on first glance. I think the sight of a pair of swans on a small lake in a westernish-looking landscape triggered flashbacks from my years in Yellowstone, where Trumpeter couples were a frequent and memorable sight. I pulled off on the shoulder, reminded myself I was in Tennessee not Montana, and trained the scope on the birds. I was greeted with a pair of big honkin' jet black bills on a couple of snow-white, straight-necked swans, the smaller of which sported a yellow collar around its (presumably her) neck. Damn, they really ARE Trumpeters! I vaguely knew there were just a small number of recent records for Tennessee, and sort of remembered that there was a reintroduction program to our north. Whatever, wild or not, they were a regal pair.

I had spent a long morning birding around Kentucky Lake with Mike Todd, whom I had left at the overlook at Britton Ford in the Big Sandy unit of Tennessee NWR looking at five species of geese practically in one field of view. I fished out his cell phone number and gave him a call to get out the alert about the swans. I had to move on from the birds after snapping some crappy images, as I was due to meet Melinda at Rhodes Lake for the first evening watch of the 2009 season at Moss Island. Fortunately Mike was able get to the birds before dark and get some excellent photos of them. In the end the collar traced back to the reintroduced populations in Wisconsin. As the reintroduced birds are generally now considered established, wild, and countable by the various records committees of the Great Lakes states, it remains only to be seen what the Tennessee committee will eventually decide. If accepts them, it turns out they will be the first "wild" Trumpeters tallied in Tennessee in over 100 years.

So, having restored one extirpated species to Tennessee's official list, it was time to go try to add another!

I arrived at Moss Island about 3:00 p.m., after an absence of 7 months. It was, of course, a very different place in January 2009 than it had been in June 2008. Most fascinating to me was that the water was far lower than I had seen it before. Large amounts of dry land had appeared in the sloughs. Upon reaching the end of Rhodes Lake Road, I actually saw the sill for the first time ever. Previously it had only been a line of trees emerging from the water, or at most a vague lightness barely visible through a couple of feet of turbid blackwater. Now it was high and dry, a single-track graveled ATV road. I also took note of what appeared to be many downed trees and large broken branches all through the woods. In the gray winter leaflessness the broken wood shined like beacons signaling "Future Woodpecker Smorgasbord!" It had been a stormy summer and autumn, most notably when the remnants of Hurricane Ike passed up the Mississippi Valley in September. Even in our neck of the woods that storm had downed some trees; Moss Island had been about 200 km closer to the track. Many of the trees seemed to be broken and felled to the northwest, an appropriate direction to be Ike effects.

Melinda arrived at about 4:00 p.m., and we sat together out in the middle of the sill watching and chatting quietly while being entertained by beavers on the lake. That's the big drawback of being in the field in pairs; the temptation to chit-chat is great. The overall mood of the crew going in to this year was upbeat; we were getting an early start on the season, and if the MIMDKWTFII was still in the area we felt like we might have a fair chance of spotting it, WTFII. Kind of like opening day of the baseball season -- everyone has hope. Over the coming months most will have it slowly stripped away from them.

It was a quiet evening out at the lake. There was only a smattering of woodpecker drumming and vocalizing, just three Pileateds, a handful of Redbellies, and one each of Downy and Hairy. The highlight was the occasional flocks of Snow Geese passing over, a phenomenon that would keep up for the next couple of months. At dusk I returned to the barn to set up camp. This year I was planning on being at Moss Isand a good bit more, at least twice a month, thanks to more travel and expense money from Scott, and a less-used more reliable pickup I had bought in December. I had decided to leave my tent set up at the barn full time, along with some basic field gear, to make my frequent comings and goings easier. I could hook up to electricity, which made the long winter evenings pass more easily.

**********

Over the next couple of days Melinda and I spread our effort around the WMA. The goals for 2009 were to first determine if there even was any suspicious activity at all this year, and second to see if there was any notable spatial or temporal pattern to any activity there might be. Well, of course, primary would be to see and photograph an Ivorybill, but that was miles beyond the objectives that structured our daily routine!

It turns out that Moss Island isn't all that bad of a place to go birding in mid-winter. The south fields had grown up into excellent grassy oldfield habitat. Though this was obviously not the place to look for Ivorybills, I gave it an hour or so at midday and some scoping at dusk, yielding a LeConte's Sparrow, American Tree Sparrow, and Short-eared Owl. The days in the woods were good for generating high counts. I think this must be the continental motherload for Winter Wrens at this season, as I tallied 23 over three days. The woodpecker tallies were 17 Redheadeds, 55 Redbellies, 6 sapsuckers, 20 Downies, 7 Hairies, 29 flickers, and 23 Pileateds, still relatively low numbers compared to the abundances I found in March last year.

Neither Melinda nor I came across anything suspicious on the Ivorybill front. In the long solo evenings in the cold tent I had plenty of time to think about last year's results and this year's strategies. A big question for me was (assuming the double knock phenomenon was real, whatever it might actually be) whether our "hot zone" was a real pattern of activity or just a reflection of our distribution of effort. I decided I'd try to address this quantitatively, at least at a rough level. As a first step towards this I came up with five subdivisions of the Moss Island forests for tallying up detections and effort. For my own record keeping purposes I also added two non-forested regions. The divisions I came up with are based as much on points of access as anything else, and are marked on the map I posted earlier. The list is:

1. Northwest woods. Moss Island Road west of the barn, north through Cocklebur Flats to Mitchell Lake.

2. North central woods. From the barn eastwards, north of Rhodes Lake Road and west of Rhodes Lake. Mostly accessed by hiking or paddling the "canoe trail" east from the Barn. Also includes the western half of Willow Flat.

3. Rhodes Lake area and south. Areas surrounding Rhodes Lake, as well as the southeastern half of Willow Flat and the shrub swamp and forest south of the sill.

4. Southeast woods. Forked Lake, Hushpuckett lake, forested areas and ATV trails south of Rhodes Lake Road and east of Goosepen Road.

5. Southwest woods. All forests south of Moss Island and Rhodes Lake roads and west of the end of Goosepen Road.

6. Central Fields. Open and mixed areas along Moss Island and Rhodes Lake roads.

7. South Fields. Open areas along the southern parts of the WMA.

In 2008 all our detections had been in regions 3 and 4, except for my dubious double knock from area 1. Most of our effort had been concentrated in those two regions as well. On my return home I would try to tally up how many person-hours of effort we had put in in each region and each month. I thought the comparison to detections might be revealing.

The intrepid swamper in the Okefenokee in 1987


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The Local Big Picture

Overview of Moss Island

All told in 2008 and 2009 we had about 30 different birders spend some time at Moss Island including our crew; 14 birders put in more than two days in the field (not including the local TWRA staff who have routine buisiness on the WMA): The core crew of me, Bob, Scott, and Melinda; Dave Pereksta, Marty Piorkowski and three Cornell volunteers; Alan Mueller and four of the Cornell full-time field staff. Collectively there were nine non-controversial double knock encounters and three controversial ones, along with at least three “brief glimpse” sightings and one or two uncertain “kent” encounters. Total effort hasn't been tabulated precisely, but is probably on the order of 1000-2000 person-hours.

There is an interesting pattern I had not noticed until recently: In each case, the “lower level” encounters (glimpses and kenting) occured within a day of a double knock encounter within the same area. Scott's glimpse and possible vocalization actually occurred in immediate association with his first double knock, Dave's 2008 glimpse was the evening before and about 300m away from the controversial double knock of 3/21/08, Alan Trently's glimpse happened about 7 or 8 hours before and about 500m south of my double knock series on 2/24/09, and my kentings were heard the day before and about 700m away from the spot from which I believe the controversial 3/18/09 double knock series emanated. Yet more circumstantial and insubstantial evidence, of course, but considering that the majority of our field days yielded nothing suspicious these clusters do raise the eyebrows a bit.

Just for fun, let's assume the MIMDKWFTII actually is a real bird, and is not a Pileated. We'll assume that the double knock is its characteristic display, not an abberation. What does the pattern of our detections reveal about this critter? First, it seems clear that though it does repeatedly visit the areas around the lakes in eastern Moss Island, it is not in full time residence there. It seems very unlikely a real diurnal bird could be so hard to find unless it was just not there most of the time. So we appear to have a bird with a large home range, only a portion of which extends into the eastern parts of the WMA -- interestingly mostly within 1000m of the Obion River corridor. It might potentally use the riparian corridors, several of which come together just southeast of our “hot zone,” to move between forest fragments. The bird does seem to sometimes spend the night at Moss Island, but perhaps not in the same place each time. One double knock near sunset, and one series just before sunrise, on different dates (actually, in different years) and in different locations suggest this.

As for behavior, the bird moves a LOT. Going in the afternoon to where it was this morning, or even just a short while before, does not turn it up. It also does not seem to like to cross the lakes. Many hours have been spent on and around Rhodes Lake without the bird ever revealing itself in the open. All the encounters in the immediate vicinity of the lake have been on the east side or to the south beyond the end of the lake; the double knocks have never been heard from the west. Encounters have happened farther west, but never heard from the lake in that direction. Finally while it may be shy of the lake, it is not actually particularly worried about people. The “hot zone” is also the part of the WMA that gets the heaviest use by hunters and fishermen. That squirrel hunter was standing only 100 or 200m from it, with two fairly large dogs, and the bird did not even flee in reaction to the gunshot. No, instead it sat still and double knocked repeatedly from the same spot. Sheesh, I heard the damn thing while sitting IN MY TRUCK parked on a public road. So the difficulties in spotting this bird seem to be a function of: mobility (doesn't stay still very long), large home range (wherever you are, it is usually somewhere else), and aversion to open spaces or even edges. It doesn't actually appear to be shy or skittish, just hyperactive, fast, and stuck like glue to the forest interior.

As an interesting note... most of these features were (are?) evidently typical behavior for an Ivory-billed Woodpecker -- more insubstantial circumstantial evidence. The one exception is the apparent utilization of fragmented forest habitat connected by narrow corridors of several miles in length. As I have written before, if Ivorybills never learned this trick, then there is no way they survived the 20th Century. So regardless of whether this was characteristic of 19th Century Ivorybills, it must be typical for 21st Century Ivorybills or there will not be any of them to look for.

Now for a bit more about the double-knocking behavior of the Mystery Double Knocker. As I mentioned before, its knocking is concentrated in the first three hours and the last two hours of daylight, and from late February until very early April. Given what appears to be the large home range and high mobility, it is hard to actually know if it really only double knocks infrequently, or if it just moves so much between performances that any given observer will not hear it more than once a day. On the one occasion when we had 12-18 people on site for two days, there were three possible encounters, two of them from different locales separated about 500m and 65 minutes. This might argue more for the problem being that the creature is alway on the move rather than its being unnaturally quiet. It does at times appear to react to loud banging sounds by double knocking; as it did this both in response to a gunshot and the double knock simulator it raises the question of whether the apparent "response" to the simulator might in fact just be a non-specific "reaction" to a general loud noise not actually recognized as a "double knock." We might do just as well by simply shooting a .22 at the top of every hour.

Perhaps to contradict myself where I stated that the hypothetical bird is usually not at Moss Island, I can play some numbers games to make guesses as to what fraction of its time it does spend there. First, working in orders of magnitude, we had a "detection" about every 100 hours. Using a general rule of thumb I find useful for many landbirds, 1 detection per hour corresponds roughly to 10 birds per square kilometer. So this detection rate would mean 1 bird per 10 km², and since we are not hypothesizing more than 1 bird this would suggest a 10 km² home range for this critter. Our "hot zone" covers about 2 km², so this gives us a very very rough estimate that the bird would be in the hot zone about 20% of the time. Where is it the other 80%? Who knows? It's still only a hypothetical bird anyway. Just to be intriguing, the hot zone covers about 20% of the forests at Moss Island, so it conceivably *could* be a full-time resident there and the apparent hot zone could still be just a statistical fluke. Or it might spend 80% of its time farther north or south along the Obion - Forked Deer riparian complex, where there are other sizable forest fragments within a few miles.

Something that might argue for a larger percentage of time spent in the hot zone is this simple observation that I had overlooked before: On days when we had 4 or more people in the field, we had a possible detection more than half the time. And again, over the two days when we had 12-18 people in the field, we totaled three possible detections. That pattern might suggest that in fact the hypothetical bird is in the hot zone full-time, or at least visits the hot zone for a while on most days. This scenario would require the bird to be significantly quieter than the average woodland bird to explain the low detection rate per observer.

These are all just games with numbers, patterns, and ideas. We of course do not have any direct evidence as to the identity of our Mystery Double Knocker. None of our sightings are remotely close to "good," and no one anywhere in North America has yet actually identified the source of these double knocks. No quantity of circumstantial patterns, hypothetical scenarios, deduction and inference can ever make an Ivory-billed Woodpecker out of mere noises and glimpses. Whatever our own personal suspicions and hopes might be, we understand perfectly well that we have not "gotten the bird."

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Where Do We Go From Here?

The potato harvest is still coming up short...

After two field seasons at Moss Island, plus additional work at other sites in previous years, we Tennesseans have no more to show for our efforts than anyone else. The Federal money is drying up; State money has never been a very large pool; personal resources are of course always quite limited. The 2009 results were just enough to ensure that it will be very hard for us to simply abandon that patch of swamp and leave the situation dangling forever. But we'll mostly be working on private time and what small portion of the schedules of our full-time professional government wildlife biologists that can be allocated to this work.

For myself, I think I will concentrate just on the period from late February into March that has been the source of most of our encounters in both previous years. I'll probably just set aside a couple of weeks to be in the field full-time, and hope I get lucky. But the bigger question is, what should I actually do with my time? What have we not tried? What, of what we have tried, has "worked," at least sort of?

There are a few basic things, of course. Sitting still or paddling and walking quietly has been what has yielded nearly all the encounters. Time spent surveying structured transects, servicing equipment, or trying to "cover ground" by paddling or hiking at more normal speeds does not seem to count. And of course always being ready with the video camera; of the three instances when I heard double knocks in series, only once did I record anything and that was purely fortuitous. I think we can perhaps learn something from some techniques employed by hunters: they focus single-mindedly on their quarry, not being distracted by other tasks, and they always have their weapon at the ready. Clearly, from all the stories of near-misses, "Luneau moments," and things recorded purely by accident, Ivorybill hunters across the region have often been falling short on these measures. I've been figuring out the idiosyncrasies of my particular camera, and have learned how to keep it on standby all day without draining the battery, with 0.5 sec lead time needed to start capturing images, and with focus and shutter speed already preset.

But, of course, even if I had been on the ready like this for all of 2008 and 2009, I still have yet to actually SEE anything that I would have needed to shoot with the camera! Scott, Dave, and Allan all had only very quick encounters that would not have allowed them time to "get the bird" even with only a second or so of necessary lead time. Is there anything else we could be doing to increase the encounter probabilities?

Two other primary tricks used by hunters are attractants and geographic bottlenecks. The only attractant that has been widely used as been the simulated double knock. Even in the tropics when used with common species, its success rate has been variable and modest at best. It's nothing like what you get when, for instance, you play an Indigo Bunting song at a territorial male Indigo Bunting! Is this just a function of the behavior of the genus, or does it reflect on the inaccuracies of the sounds coming out of the double knocker as compared to the real thing? Bottlenecks have not necessarily been widely employed, and perhaps we should spend more time looking at aerial photos while thinking about a wide-ranging, obligate forest interior species. Interestingly, several riparian corridors converge on the southeastern corner of Moss Island, very close to our Rhodes Lake "hot zone."

The one final thing which has actually been effective at Moss Island is simple person power. Days when we had four or more people in the field were substantially more likely to yield something. Pulling this together with the other thoughts above, I can think of three strategies for the limited time in 2010. First, just siting in the woods east of Rhodes Lake, trying to stay awake, waiting for something to happen. Second, studying the maps further and exploring some of the surrounding areas that the riparian corridors connect to. Third, arrange a couple of weekend "big sits" to fill the "hot zone" with stationary, alert, equipped observers for a couple of days. None of this is new; but having perhaps narrowed down the season and location better it might improve the odds a small bit.

As for the grand scheme, Moss Island is just a microcosm of the larger pattern. Everyone remains in limbo, finding too much to just quit, not enough to conclude anything. If there really are Ivorybills behind any of this, there seem to be an extremely small number of them. This makes the quest simultaneously almost futile and even more important. No one knows how to proceed, and everyone seems to be shutting down or scaling back. This will mostly leave the freelancers on their own in the field, plus the occasional chance encounter, rumors from hunters, and similar things. If the beasts are still out there, they have managed this far without our direct assistance; indeed, "being found" has never really helped these birds. The Singer Tract got clearcut just the same, after all. In the Big Woods the birding community has shown a marked preference for image artifacts and incredible space-time bending white bleed over a living Ivorybill. A metaphysical sort might wonder why the critters would even bother with showing themselves to us for all the good it has ever done for them!

And now, 31 blog posts later, I'm afraid this is where I have to leave the tale. Thank you all for reading (slogging through?) to the end.

Someday, somewhere, somehow, someone has GOT to see whatever the hell it is that is making these double knocks.

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Firebirds

I remained at Moss Island for two more days, with no more hints of the MIMDKWTFII. Bob Ford and one of the TWRA field techs were in the area as well, with similar (non) results. I did make my first explorations into the trail-less wildlands I have dubbed the "southwest woods." Here I found out where all the oaks were hiding, along with sweetgums, pecans, and other diverse bottomland hardwoods. Given this, and whatever had happened along the main road on the 22nd and 23rd, I felt like I should start spreading my effort around more widely across the WMA, rather than focusing so heavily just around Rhodes Lake. It's always hard to know in the case of any bird (assuming the MIMDKWTFII is some sort of bird) that is found repeatedly but not continuously one defined area whether that is because the bird prefers that spot or because the observers are just focusing on that spot and ignoring other areas (Patagonia rest stop effect again).

I made another trip to the site in early May. My results and thinking at this time are summed up in this e-mail I sent to the rest of the crew:

Subject: Moss Island this week
Date: May 9, 2008
To: Scott Somershoe, Melinda Welton, Bob Ford
Cc: "Jacob"

Just returned, saw just about everything but the object of the search. Major movement of migrants. The most impressive event was Wednesday afternoon when I took a long walk through the woods from the barn northeastwards, then around to the far side of Rhodes Lake. The Obion was rising again, and spreading into the forest in that area. All along the edge of the advancing water the warblers, thrushes, and other passerines were actively feeding on the critters fleeing the rising water, concentrating them in the lower 20' or so of the forest and in areas of very open understory. It was the most impressive display of EASILY SEEN migrants I think I have ever encountered away from coastal fallout zones! I had 20 species of warblers on that walk, which didn't even begin until noon, and the majority of the individuals were seen, not heard (singing was pretty quiet). I also had more Gray-cheeked Thrushes in one day than I can every recall having seen south of their boreal nesting grounds, along with plenty of Swainson's and Veeries.

Water levels peaked yesterday evening and were dropping slowly again today. The road was open all the way to the Rhodes Lake turnaround (one small shallow ford just before the lake, with pickerels literally laying in the road on their bellies, dorsal fins sticking up above the water shark-like, grabbing smaller fish that were swept into the road by the current!), but the sill was still underwater and I had to wade in waist deep water on the ATV road to get from the Obion side back to the road side after my warbler-filled hike on Wednesday. Lacking waders, I just held my gear overhead and got wet (it was a warm day). The ATV trail south from the mid-road turnaround on Rhodes Lake road is completely open; the one northeast from the barn is still flooded just a few 100m into the woods.

I covered the areas north of the road from west to east, and the areas south of the road from east of Goosepen road to west of Hushpucket and Forked lakes. East of the lakes, the sloughs were still too deep for hiking. Nothing IBWO-ish to report. Leafout is near 100%, except for the pecans which are less than 50%. Pileated activity is increasing some, but you'd still be hard-pressed to turn up a Hairy for money. Good sunset chorus of drumming (mostly Pileateds) at Rhodes lake, and the sunset sit is much easier now with the road passable. Mississippi Kites and nighthawks now provide aerial entertainment while you sit.

One or two Swainson's Warblers in the turnaround-ATV trail area. Not heard a single Cerulean yet.

I took a few more looks at that large area of hardwoods in the southwest part of the WMA, from Goosepen Road to Great River Road. It is the largest chunk of real mixed hardwood forest on the site, with most of the oaks. It has also been covered the least, probably. Scott had made comments that the habitat there was not very good, but none of the habitat at Moss Island is very good by Congaree/Big Woods standards. To me it looked as good as anywhere else, and actually has quite a number of large (by local standards) oaks, elms, sugarberries, and pecans. I will probably focus there on my next visit, since it has gotten relatively little coverage, and we're not finding much anywhere else.

More thoughts about habitat quality... the areas around Rhodes Lake that were our "hot zone" February-March are mostly Black Willow, Silver Maple, and Cottonwood. I doubt you'll find any reference suggesting that as even close to "good Ivorybill habitat." So if we've got a bird there, we can already throw the habitat books out the window. One thing I have been pondering is this:

Those willows are huge and ancient, for a generally small, short-lived tree. The cottonwoods are also huge and showing their age. I am thinking maybe there is a senescence pulse going on with an age class of willows and cottonwoods, and that has been providing foraging habitat. One thing I have noticed in the last couple of visits: there is no Cypress/Tupelo phase at Moss Island. There are a very few scattered cypress trees, and I have not yet seen a single tupelo. All the trees I thought were tupelos in the winter, like those ones in the sloughs with their nice prominent buttswells and tupelo-like bark, have proven to be green ash now that they are leafed out. My guess is that the cypress/tupelo was completely logged out early in the 20th century, and that scraggly willow-cottonwood-silver maple community grew in to replace it. Now those old, almost even-aged stands of fast-growing pioneer trees are getting to their expiration dates, and becoming a woodpecker smorgasbord. But I doubt they would provide suitable Ivorybill nest sites, even if they provide winter foraging grounds. Hence my continuing interest in the mixed hardwood forests farther west, in spite of the relative lack of detections there.

Just some ramblings

Bill

In the middle of May came our annual opportunity to hear S. J. Tucker a.k.a. Skinny White Chick perform. She's a Memphis based singer/songwriter, a tiny woman with an enormous voice. She opened with a set of entirely new music from her latest CD. When she picked up her djembe and started into Firebird's Child, I was mesmerized:

Of course the song has nothing to do with woodpeckers, it's about having the courage to live in your passions. But does make me wonder if perhaps we should use a big-ass djembe as a double knock simulator!

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The Mystery Remains

And the answer is...?

As of today (October 29, 2009), there have been no more encounters with the MIMDKWFTII. I've only made a few visits since June, and am probably done for 2009 as there's no money and not much free time in the near future. We made no real progress on the overall goal: Determine WTF the MIMDK is.

I do come away from the 2009 season, however, firmly convinced that the Mystery Double Knocker is a real and coherent phenomenon, not just an agglomeration of assorted misinterpreted and misconstrued unrelated ordinary occurences. Out of the whole 20 months I have been involved in this project, one or two minutes on one day haunt me the most. It was that afternoon of February 24, 2009, as the rain was ending and the grizzled squirrel hunter across the lake shot his supper. The string of double knocks that followed were utterly clear, perfect, and undeniable. Unlike my first encounter, I knew exactly what I was listening for, and what I was hearing. I was all alone, the rest of the crew having bailed because of the weather, sitting there by myself in the drizzly late afternoon gray. If my first encounter in 2008 was the Black Swan flying across the sun, this one was the Black Swan sitting on the hood of my truck. No denying its existence, no hope of talking myself out of this one. And, I knew the damn thing was just gonna fly off and disappear again.

As a loose end from my last post, some might wonder why I spent all this time analyzing my 3/18/09 recording when I expressed such strong objections to robobirders in an earlier post. Thing is, a real "meat birder" holding a video camera is not a robobirder. All that additional information that is lacking in robodata is present in the birder-videocam combo: context, apparent distance and direction, subjective impressions of quality, loudness, etc. The digital data and the analog experience are able to complement each other, without either making the other obsolete. But in reality, I think at this point in the Tennessee project the desire for "objective" documentation has as much to do with peer pressure than anything else. We have no doubt amongst ourselves about the reality and validity of the double knock phenomenon at Moss Island.

But what about all the alternative explanations for the double knocks? As far as the misinterpretation of ordinary sounds (e.g. gunshots, boat clunks, off-site mechanical sounds), in spite of how we sometimes seem to be viewed by northeasterners and west coast types, we are actually a pretty skilled, experienced, and discriminating crew. We take great care to rule these things out, and have clearly noted these double knocks as being something consistent and unusual. The various non-biological explanations also don't work with the spatial, seasonal, and diurnal pattern we have seen. Weather, construction, etc. aren't most active in the first three hours and last two hours of the day, they don't ramp up in late February and quiet down again around the end of March, and they don't cluster within the woods in the Rhodes-Hushpuckett Lakes corridor. No, the only thing that fits this is a biological source; specifically a mobile diurnal one. In other words, a bird.

What about duck wingtip collisions? Sorry, those may be able to confuse a robobirder, but they don't cut it as an explanation for the live sounds. They are an especially poor match for the double knocks that occur in series, repeatedly from the exact same direction; nor do they account for the freakishly intense loudness of the double knocks when heard from distances of about 200m or less. Really, there's only one option. It has to be a woodpecker -- a big one. Nothing else is properly equipped.

Here we come to the only alternative explanation that makes the cut: Could the Mystery Double Knocker be nothing more than a Pileated Woodpecker? Pileateds are certainly capable of making loud noises with their peckers; indeed they seem quite fond of this sort of thing, especially in late winter and early spring. They are also extremely common at Moss Island and in most other coastal plain bottomland forests in the southeastern U.S. However, no one has ever documented a Pileated making these dead-ringer-for-Campehilus double knocks; no one has actually documented a Pileated making any double knocks that are not embedded within an abundance of normal Pileated sounds. But, no one has yet specifically documented ANYTHING north of Mexico making these dead-ringer-for-Campephilus double knocks in about 70 years. Large woodpeckers have been glimpsed fleeing the scene of the (double knock) crime, but have not been seen well enough to definitely identify as Pileated or not-Pileated. It's not just the Moss Island Mystery Double Knocker, it's the North American Mystery Double Knocker.

But why not just claim Occam's Razor and call it a Pileated? Well, until someone actually sees something else making the sound, it can't be entirely ruled out. However, a lot of things don't fit. First, Pileateds are common and widespread in much of North America, not just the coastal plain bottomlands. Yet the phenomenally loud double knock has never been identified or described as part of their repertoire anywhere, by anyone. Perhaps it is an unusual display, used only rarely, and therefore only likely to be heard where they are especially abundant. Or, perhaps it is only a small percentage of individuals that engage in this display, which might also explain the spatial clustering in “hot zones.” Several things argue against these ideas. First, Pileateds are more common in bottomland hardwoods than in other forest habitats, but only by a factor of like 3-5, not by orders of magnitude. I live surrounded by hill-n-holler upland hardwood forests in middle Tennessee, where I see and hear Pileateds many times every day. Many other experienced birders live in similar proximity to the species. I've yet to hear any of these double knocks at home, where I spend far more time than I do at Moss Island. Even with all the publicity and skepticism surrounding double knocks in recent years, no one has turned up data showing any of these tens of thousands of backyard Pileateds making this sound. Believe me, if one of these things went off in your backyard, you WOULD notice! As for the “hot zones” being caused by individual aberrant Pileateds, they actually tend to be bigger than the typical home range of a Pileated in these densely-packed habitats, so you'd need multiple neighboring birds that posessed this aberrant behavior to explain the phenomenon this way. Anyway, woodpecker drums are pretty hard-wired, fixed, inborn display patterns. They're not subject to learning and they hardly vary between individuals or circumstances. It seems very unlikely there would be a distinctive, conspicuous, yet undescribed Pileated display still lurking out in the woods.

If I were in a court of law right now I'd probably be raked over the coals at this point for having produced nothing but circumstantial evidence. It's true, that's all I got, ain't nuthin' else. Until someone SEES the f'ing thing we will not really know. It's all Just So Stories in the meantime. I'm not going to commit the sin I have chastized others for and say “I don't know what it is, but I know it isn't a Pileated.” I don't think it is a Pileated, but I really just plain don't know what it is.

There only seem to be two options, however.

In the rest of my "wrap up" posts I'll talk about some of the larger implications of all this, speculate wildly about woodpeckers, and give opinions about what we should do from here onward.

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Down to the Delta

Go west, young man, and seek your woodpecker!

March 10, 2008

Green Frog, Maury City, Bells, Halls, Frog Jump ... this was not a part of Tennessee I was at all familiar with. Other than the freeways, my only prior experience in northwest Tennessee consisted of my Breeding Bird Survey route up near Reelfoot Lake. That had been enough, though, to let me know this was a very different world than the Hill-'n'-Holler country where we live. My home county is dissected plateaus, forests, ravines, steep slopes, streams with sparkling clear water over rock and cobble beds. This was flat, vast open fields broken by wooded riparian corridors and windbreaks, and in summer hot, steamy, and buggy. I had learned that biogeographically it is also a strange place. Warbling Vireos, Tree Swallows, and Baltimore Orioles nesting among baldcypress was not a combination that made sense to me. On my current journey it was winter, and the gently rolling fields had a decidedly midwestern feel to them. I could easily imagine I was back in eastern Colorado if I didn't look too closely, especially if I didn't focus on the western horizon where the absence of the Rocky Mountains was rather a giveaway.

Beyond Frog Jump was Porter Gap, which indeed was a gap in the traditional Appalachian sense, but on a smaller scale. Cresting the rise at the west edge of the Chickasaw Bluffs, I looked out over the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, colloquially called "the Delta" even this far north, stretched out about 100 feet below me and seemingly flat as the surface of the sea. It was almost as wet as the surface of the sea as well. The Mississippi had been rising steadily, backing up the tributaries and turning the fallow fields into sprawling shallow lakes. After descending the bluff, the state highway effectively became a causeway, with the wind-tossled floodwaters lapping right at the shoulder of the road on both sides in some spots, only a few feet below the pavement. Where the flood had not yet claimed the entire area of some fields, huge flocks of blackbirds swarmed along the diminishing shoreline, presumably feeding on all manner of critters that had been pushed out by the rising water. If I had bothered to stop and make estimates I likely would have set new personal high counts for some species.

I didn't stop, however. The whole scene had put me in a very strange frame of mind. The reason I was making this trip was peculiar enough -- looking for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers? In Tennessee? Get serious, bro! The unfamiliar and somewhat disorienting countryside, combined with a foreboding flat gray sky, added to the rather unreal sense of it all. But the strongest trigger had been the water. If you're an old-time swamper, like me, then rising water just gets your blood pumping and your mind racing. It becomes instinctive, a conditioned reflex. Anything can happen when the water starts climbing. It's both exciting and intimidating. And... I didn't have my boat. Scott had suggested that there was not likely to be a real need for it, so it was still back at home ditched in the weeds on the shore of the pond. Not only was I traveling into unknown country on a ridiculous quest in the face of rising floodwaters, I was also not properly equipped. Nothing to do about that now.

Back to my driving directions. From here it was north on Great River Road, and about three miles to the entrance to the site. Crossing over the Obion River and then landing on the Mississippi River Levee, I pondered then as I still ponder now: What is the point of a huge levee fortification along the Mississippi that just ends like this at the mouth of the Obion? Wouldn't seem to provide much impediment to the movement of floodwaters in either direction. As directed, I turned east off the levee down the fairly good-condition gravel road, continued a bit to the edge of the woods, and found the sign: Moss Island Wildlife Management Area. Judging from the old, faded, and beaten condition of the sign, this was not one of the flagship units of the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency's network of WMAs. The fact that the sign was not visible until after you had already turned off Great River Road and travelled several hundred yards into the backwoods also suggested this was not a place that was a great draw for visitors from beyond the immediate area.

How we wound up here was the usual long story, involving the traditional mix of strange and inconclusive tales from locals and TWRA staff. As I haven't cleared the names and details with all involved I won't go in to them here. What really set off the search was that two day period in late February when Scott finally had an opportunity to check out the place, starting a flurry of "detections" in a short time and a small area. On the face of it, this spot does not seem a likely candidate. In my own surveys of aerial photos across the southeast, I had passed off all of the delta region of Tennessee as too fragmented to warrant much attention. Moss Island was just another one of these fragments, and not even especially impressive or large within that context. As I drove down the main road what I saw seemed to confirm my remotely-sensed impression On my left was pretty but unremarkable bottomland forest (flooded, I noted with a twinge of anxiety... why hadn't I brought the boat?), on the right were fields that still remained high and dry. Well at least Moss Island was indeed a bit of an island; you learn quickly in the swamp world, though, that "island" means "doesn't flood quite as often." It does not mean "dry land."

Scott's directions were to head to the end of the road at the turnaround at Rhodes Lake, and wait. In the initial work done so far, that was the "hot zone." It was now early afternoon; he and Melinda would be meeting me at around 5:00 p.m. I continued in, past the the house where the island's entire permanent resident population (one family, four people, variable numbers of dogs, cats, and chickens) resides, and through more fields, now on both sides of the road. A buteo flying low over the fields to my right caught my eye -- long-wings, languid flight, check that one out. It perched atop an old pecan tree in the fields, I got my optics on it -- yes, Rough-legged Hawk! A first for my sadly neglected Tennessee list, and a bird that has always thrilled me, even in our Colorado days when they were a common winter sight. As pleased as I was to see this handsome creature, it also added to the "where am I and what am I doing here?" sense of the expedition. Seriously, when you are looking for Ivorybill habitat, a Roughleg does not seem like a promising sign. Talk about species with antipodal habitat requirements!

But then, another few hundred yards down the road, that biogeographic hash that is west Tennessee worked its tricks. I dropped down a small slope, entered the forest, and suddenly I was in the swamps of the Deep South. The road was lined with canebreaks, the leafless oaks, sweetgums, maples, and other hardwoods were not huge but they were not shabby, and my swamper soul was right at home. Later I would learn that right near where I had spotted the Roughleg, a few days before Bob Ford had spotted a Common Ground-Dove. I was beginning to figure out that when you are here on the western fringe of the state, you should pretty much be prepared for anything.

Now that I was back in my old familiar world, in a swamp with the river rising, I was not at all surprised when the road disappeared under the water before I reached the designated rendezvous spot. There was a white pickup with Federal plates parked in a pullout just before the water, which I guessed was probably Bob's. Well I had at least brought chest waders, if I didn't have a boat. I suited up and started slogging onward into the swamp. By this time the sky had mostly cleared, the wind had subsided, and the bird activity was picking up. One of the things about these swamps is that, especially in winter, they really don't have a particularly birder-tempting avifauna The most common species are things like Tufted Titmouse, Northern Cardinal, Carolina Wren, and Red-bellied Woodpecker -- species you can find easily in the average suburban backyard. It's not a place for a twitcher. As a consequence, of course, birders spend disproportionately little time in these habitats. Swamping is really more a total environmental experience than a birding trip.

My slog was cut short fairly quickly. Even with chesters, I was dangerously close to topping my waders just a little ways farther down the road, long before reaching Rhodes Lake. It seemed my afternoon of sitting and watching would happen back at the edge of the water near my truck. So back I went, encountering Bob on my way. He had a boat, clever fellow, and was wrapping up his day. He filled me in on the latest news, headed out, and I had the WMA to myself. This left me a couple of hours to sit, listen, and ponder what on earth I was doing here.

Double knocks. That was the main thing that had been found here, and in many other places. I had never quite gotten this "double knock" thing. I had heard the recordings, and read the discussions, but it seemed like such a non-specific sort of sound. I hadn't had the opportunity to hear other Campephilus species' double knocks in person, so I didn't really know first hand; but it just seemed, like cavities and foraging sign, to be a tenuous and vague thing. Listening to the woods around me, I heard all sorts of knocks, bangs, and bumps. Some were animals, some were plants, some were trucks going over the bridges on the adjacent highways making rhythmic "whump-whumps" on the expansion joints, some were the loud bangs and clanks and whams from the barge loading and unloading facilities a few miles farther west along the Mississippi, some were the inevitable and ubiquitous gunshots that never seemed to stop in the rural South no matter what was going on with hunting seasons. How the hell would you single out a "double knock" from this racket?

As dusk was nearing, Scott arrived and we finally met face-to-face for the first time. I think he must have been warned that I was not a typical looking birder, as he seemed unphased by my two feet each of hair and beard. Well, actually, his first words were "Holy crap!" but that was directed at the water level rather than at my hirsuteness. Melinda arrived shortly afterwards, and was equally shocked by the lake where the road had once been. These were my first clues that my co-searchers were not old-time swampers (not yet, at least; they'd earn their credential pretty fast in the coming weeks). I looked at the conspicuous line on the trees marking the typical annual high water mark, and it was still above my head. I looked at the water several meters below this line, and wondered what the fuss was about. We had a long way to go before this would rate as a significant flood. It turns out that though Scott and Melinda had been working in the bottomlands along the Mississippi for two seasons, and Melinda had done a stint in Arkansas with the Cornell project, they had been doing so during a severe drought. They had no image in their heads of how a more typical hydrograph translated into what the real world would look like, and were a tad dumbfounded when confronted with it. Lacking this experience or these instincts, they had installed reconyx cameras and autonomous sound recording units on trees way below that high-water line of demarcation on the trunks. An urgent rescue mission was planned for the next morning.

Scott supplied me with maps, and went over them with me summarizing the area and the activity. Moss Island is situated in a large rightward bend of the Obion River, just above its confluence with the Mississippi. The WMA is roughly circular, containing a large reversed "C" of forest abutting the Obion, with a finger of open fields intruding in the central area and large open parcels on the south. The entire area is only a few kilometers across; all told there might be 5 or 10 km2 of forest. The areas closer to the Obion consist of ridge and swale topography in long sweeping arcs paralleling the river with quite a number of oxbow lakes. Farther west is higher terrace physiography; that is "Moss Island" proper. Our current parking spot was, of course, where the terrace drops off into the swales; hence the deep water just to our east. There was only this one passable road through the forest, jaggedly bisecting the backwards "C" from west to east and terminating at Rhodes Lake. Other than that it was ATV trails -- unmaintained, unmapped, and often indistinct -- and trackless wilderness. We went over where the observers had been standing during each incident, and the estimated distances and directions of what had been heard. It sure did look like whatever it was, it was clustered pretty tightly in the Rhodes Lake area.

After we watched and listened to the swamp growing dark, Scott led the way to the Comfort Inn in Dyersburg, which had become headquarters for the nascent expedition. Tomorrow Scott and Melinda were planning to head out via canoe to rescue the equipment; I would figure out somewhere that I could explore on foot, given that the previous "hot zone" was inundated.

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Dead of Winter, Ghosts Included

This was proving to be the first real winter that much of Tennessee had experienced in several years. A steady chain of storms kept me away from Moss Island for the rest of January and into early February. On January 28th an ice storm of legendary magnitude encrusted a swath from Arkansas into Kentucky with 1 to 3 inches of freezing rain. This caught the northwest corner of Tennessee, demolishing most of the power distribution grid in Dyer, Lake, and Obion counties. Moss Island received just a glancing blow; there were a lot of branches and a few trees down, but in comparison to what happened just a few miles farther north it looked untouched. As I would find later in the year, from Dyersburg north the tree damage was reminiscent of what we saw on the upper coast of South Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo. The big difference was that the ice storm dropped everything straight down rather than pointing uniformly to the northwest. But the overall impact was similar, near total stripping of all small to medium sized branches on most trees, with many topped or felled completely. The Great Ice Storm of '09 will be talked of for generations to come in these areas, I am sure.

I finally got in a few field days in early February, continuing with my rotation through the WMA. The results were much the same as in January -- large numbers of woodpeckers in an absolute sense, but still relatively low activity compared to the early spring of '08. A bumper crop of winterberries (the fruit of Ilex decidua) and poison ivy berries had drawn in hoards of American Robins and Yellow-rumped Warblers, and the Pine Siskin invasion had even reached this extremely pine-less corner of the South. But, of course, nothing campephilish, no encounters with the MIMDKWFTII. So far our early start on the season didn't have much to show for it, but I stuck with the strategy, hitting all the regions and keeping eyes and ears open.

Mid-February was also the time for the Great Backyard Bird Count as well as the Rusty Blackbird Blitz. Moss Island is good Rusty habitat, so I headed there for a day trip on February 14th. Sunrise caught me driving through Frog Jump, where a Rough-legged Hawk hung in the air over the highway. By then I was getting more accustomed to the strange biogeographic juxtapositions of the upper Delta region, and was able to just enjoy the bird without pondering the irony. I decided to spend about an hour in each of my defined regions, then head back home. I only came up with 35 Rusties, lower than what I often find, but the data come out the way the data come out. My woodpecker counts were improving a bit, with 16 Pileateds on the morning. On my way out, I came across Judy and her oldest daughter Beulah in their yard. Beulah is 17 and a very eager young outdoorswoman. Scott had equipped her with notebook, field guide, and camera just in case she came across anything.

Turns out she had come across something.

The previous morning, February 13th, she had hiked the ATV trail to Forked Lake. As she began to head back to the trailhead, a big black and white thing tore past her at breakneck speed. The account I wrote up at the time, based on my conversation with her, reads as follows:

She was walking back north on the Forked Lake ATV trail at about 11:15 (maybe she said 11:30) a.m. in the area that it crosses through the canebrake. She saw the bird flying past towards the north end of Forked Lake, moving very fast. She tried to get her camera up, but it was on power save and would not wake up fast enough. What she described was a bird that was bigger than a crow, black, and as she described it like the rear part of the wings had been painted white. The sketch in her notebook shows almost the entire rear half of the wings white, which would represent all the secondaries and most of the inner primaries. It also shows rather long wings. She didn't have time to note any other features, like crest, bill, dorsal stripes, etc. It's a story that has become very familiar over the last few years! The nature of the sighting, her description and her sketch are all spookily similar to the Harrison-Gallagher sighting of 2/27/04. She was confident that it had white all the way to the rear of the wings. She also commented many times on how fast the bird was moving. I didn't have my camera in hand when she showed me her sketch; I should have snapped a photo of it.

One thing I should add to that is that the bird was gliding the whole time of the sighting, without wingbeats. From what I gathered, it had been one fast swoop at pretty close range, with the bird banking as it passed her showing her its dorsal side. And in a flash it was gone.

Do I even need to repeat the mantra? All together now: What do we make of this report? Beulah literally grew up in these woods, and she has long been interested in their fauna. But, she's generally taken more of an interest in the bugs than the birds, and she's had little formal tutoring in the standard techniques of observational field biology. And once again we come across differences in language between the codified terminology birders are accustomed to and the more idiosyncratic ways that normal people describe things. This came up in the case of this sighting when Beulah independently told her tale to Melinda. Then she referred to a "white line on the back." The sketch she showed me distinctly indicated white bands along the rear portion of the wings. "Band" versus "line," "back" versus "rear." And, of course, like any normal person who has not been indoctrinated in rare bird documentation protocols, she looked at her field guide before drawing her sketch. I did observe that her sketch did not include much spurious detail, just a black bird with long wings and a big white band along the trailing edge, viewed from above. It boils down to what has become the standard unsatisfying Ivorybill sighting: bird seen very fast, no time to note anything but white secondaries, gone before the camera is ready to shoot. How much the brain can really take in accurately under those circumstances is always uncertain. It is also worth remembering that Scott photographed a White-winged Scoter on Rhodes Lake the previous March.

Still and all, it was something at least. Maybe things would pick up as we got into the second half of February. Dave Pereksta was going to be sacrificing his annual vacation on the Ivorybill altar yet again, and was due to arrive for two weeks at Moss Island (at his own expense) on February 23rd. I sure hoped we had some weather other than cold, rain, snow, and wind, and some exciting piciformic action to make his trip worthwhile.

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Onward in the Fog

Kenting, kenning

Through the rest of early March, only a few more days of field work happened and none of it by me. Classic early spring weather seemed to be bringing rain, snow, and/or wind on the majority of days.

By this same time in 2008, we had tallied something like 5 or 6 double knock detections by four different observers, with less effort. For 2009, it stood at one detection by one observer, if one only counts the actual birders and does not include Beulah's reports. There seemed to be two apparently contradictory patterns that our 2009 result (singular) pointed out. First, obviously, was that the MIMDKWFTII might be present, or at least was present on one occasion, in 2009, but it was much less active than in 2008.

Second, however, it also seemed to validate the reality of the 2008 "hot zone." We had collectively made an effort to spread our time more widely in the WMA than in 2008; I for one had concentrated on dispersing myself as close to uniformly as was practical. And still, when our 2009 detection finally came, it was smack dab in the middle of the nexus of activity from 2008. So, it did finally appear that the 2008 "hot zone" was not just an illusion created by concentrated effort, but reflected a real pattern of the activity of the MIMDKWFTII. Hence, strategies and priorities were readjusted, and we were back to concentrating on the Hushpuckett-Rhodes Lake corridor with reduced (but still non-zero) effort in the other sectors.

And, of course, there was the matter of the gunshot. As much as I disliked it, there was a case to be made that if the double knocker would double knock in response to a gunshot, then there might be value in using the double knock simulator. My only public comment about this to Scott was "just make sure we all know where and when you will be doing simulations so I don't waste time tracking you."

Underneath all the strategizing, there were other issues brewing. For one, if you look back in my blog archives for March of 2009 you will see one great big massive ball of confusion that was hurtling through the online ibwosphere at the same time, which by virtue of an odd series of events wound up selecting this self-same Little Red Blog as its ground zero. This had no direct relevance to our Tennessee work, but it was consuming a great deal of my own time and thoughts, and behind-the-scenes seemed to be building to some sort of crescendo that was not necessarily going to be a positive thing. Directly on the Moss Island front I was acutely aware of the days ticking off since that grizzled squirrel hunter shot his .22 in the woods east of Rhodes Lake on the afternoon of February 24th. One can start to feel directly responsible for the followup to something like that, and take each passing acampephilitic day as a personal failing. It can also be difficult to hush the internal whispers of paranoia, the thought that the rest of the crew is beginning to doubt your reliability, veracity, and sanity, regardless of what might actually be said, done, or thought.

March 17, 2009

Finally the weather, schedules, and unreliable household vehicles had cooperated and I was back on site. I had arrived after dark the previous night; the last 36 hours before I left home had been tumultuous in that other Ivorybill arena surrounding Steve Sheridan's photograph. The distance measurements had been independently confirmed, the mystery bird was the size of a Red-headed Woodpecker, all of this was still secret. Most others who were privy to this information seemed far more charitable that I and continued trying to figure out the impossible gyrations or incredibly unlikely errors in image processing that could have created that image without malice or mendacity. Misanthropic ol' me thought the answer was simple and obvious: if the distance numbers are right then the image is faked. This had been my position for over a year; now that the "if" was satisfied we proceed to the "then." Regardless, I had a bunch of blog postings that were now at best moot and at worse blatantly misleading that needed to be tagged, flagged, and edited to reflect the new info; but as this new info was still secret it was not my place (yet) to be the whistleblower and I just had to leave them as they were. All told, under these circumstances, it had been blissful to head west into the land of no internet and no cell coverage for a 48-hour escape from the turmoil.

Scott had a birding pal of his, Ryan from Kentucky, along for the ride; between them, me, and Melinda we were four. Scott also had the double knock simulator. The plan was that he would do 5 simulated double knocks separated by 10 seconds, starting at the top (:00) and bottom (:30) of each hour. On this day he was planning to be way up in the northwest near Mitchell Lake, while I was going to be in The Spot east of Rhodes Lake, so he should be far, far out of my earshot. I drove out from the barn before sunrise, getting out of my truck at the end of Rhodes Lake Road at about 6:45 a.m. with sunrise scheduled for 7:05 a.m. I took a bit of time to gather my gear together, as I had pretty much just thrown on my clothes and jumped right in the truck from my tent without a whole lot of advance prep. Once I had my stuff collected, I set off towards the sill.

And, for the first time in my life, my "kent" alarm went off.

As is the case for many birders who grew up chasing feathery things around the southeastern U.S. in the 1970s, I had the Singer Tract Ivorybill audio recording burned into my DNA. For 35 years, whenever I had been in any kind of coastal plain bottomland forest there was always a "kent detector" running in the background of my mental processes. Considering where I had lived and some of the things I had done for a living, this process had logged thousands and thousands of hours without a single hit. Until now.

Through the fog, from the direction of the east shore of the shrub swamp, south of the sill, a distinct kent-like sound had just come. I picked up my pace and continued listening. A minute or two later, it came again, and the "kent" alarm once again tripped. It was not close, a couple of hundred meters. I was, surprisingly, not getting hyped up about this. For better or for worse, one thing we had all learned over the last few years is that there are a very large number of things that can sound kent-like. True, I had never been aware of having heard any of them before, but that was irrelevant. The kent had proven to be no more distinctive or diagnostic than the double knock. The most suspicious possibility for the culprit behind what I was hearing was a Pied-billed Grebe. There had been courting and singing grebes around Rhodes Lake for weeks. At the distance from which I had heard the kent-like sounds I could not tell whether they were coming from lake altitude or tree altitude.

I continued towards the sill at a fast walk, and heard several more of the kent-like sounds. As I rounded the bend and got onto the sill with a better view towards the apparent source, I also got the video camera running. I knew, of course, that even if the camera recorded something that was spectrographically identical to the Singer Tract kents this would establish nothing, as the Ivorybill "kent" is really just a rather generic high-pitched "honk" and can be matched very easily on a sonogram by many other things. It didn't matter; predictably, once I got a clear view towards the direction of the kents, and had the camera running, I heard no more. Nor did I hear or see a Pied-billed Grebe in that direction, but that means little.

After a sufficient time of staring across the shrub swamp into the foggy woods while hearing and seeing nothing, I headed onwards on the original plan. I hiked to a permanent deer stand that I had found earlier in the year, and enjoyed the view from it for a good portion of the morning:



While headed back for the lunch rendezvous, I debated what to do about the morning's kentings. They really didn't amount to much; on the other hand we had so little going on it seemed a shame to just dismiss anything no matter how small. So I waited until the entire gang of four was gathered and then told the story, complete with piles of caveats about not putting much significance to it. Melinda immediately came up with the Pied-billed Grebe hypothesis as well, to which I agreed, and the lunchtime chatter went off in other directions. Of course the paranoia whispers kept pointing out things like "oh yeah, THAT did wonders for your credibility." Now, the facts that none of us had ever actually heard a grebe "kent," nor had ever heard of such a thing, nor had any of us previously heard anything else "kenting" at Moss Island were, in the surreal Ivorybill parallel universe, irrelevancies.

I split the very quiet afternoon between the southwest woods and the "canoe trail." Ryan had departed after lunch, just leaving the three of us camped on site overnight. That evening we had a discussion about what the future plan should be, since Moss Island seemed to have dramatically cooled off. We talked about expanding to adjacent areas, that sort of thing; we also discussed whether there was any reason to maintain secrecy given the lack of activity this year. I did feel the need to point out that we were in fact not entirely without detections for 2009, I had heard a double knock series just three weeks before, a reminder that seemed to be met with something akin to "yeah, whatever." More internal paranoid whispers.

I had already been pondering that I was in danger of becoming the Tyler Hicks of Moss Island, the one who seems to keep getting detections when no one else does and hence becomes the target of suspicion and derision. I now had the only detection for 2009, and my two double knock series were the only reported detections of that sort for the entire state of Tennessee, ever. All others had been individual double knocks in isolation. This could become a problem. After that evening's conversation I decided that I might need to give serious consideration to actually choosing not to report anything else I might see or hear unless I got it on tape. An additional undocumented encounter would do little or nothing to change the situation, anyway.

On that note, it was off to bed, or at least off to sleeping bag. Tomorrow's plan was for Melinda to sit on the Rhodes Lake shore while I paddled Willow Flat. Scott would start at "the turnaround" on the road west of Rhodes Lake and head north into the woods, doing his double knock simulations on the :00/:30 schedule as he went. Ever forward in the quest for the Hope Eater.

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Conflict, Confusion, and RoboBirders

For the remainder of their time in Tennessee, the Cornell crew only made it out in the field for one more full day, April 5th. On the 6th they did put in a half day, but that was mostly dedicated to retrieving Reconyx cameras. My info about these days is second hand, passed to me via Scott, as I was 160 miles away at the time. Apparently on the 5th Leighton heard a double knock while he was in the woods east of Rhodes Lake, with the sound coming from the south. According to Scott, Leighton said that if he had been in the tropics he would have identified what he heard as a Pale-billed Woodpecker, a sound he is familiar with. In Tennessee, on the other hand, he didn't know what to make of it. Do any of us? All told for their week in Tennessee, the augmented Cornell crew had three full field days plus one short take-down day. The crew ranged from 4 to 7 people each day, in 4 to 6 boats. Two double knocks were reported, no sightings, no kentings. And so it goes, on and on and on... It seemed that nothing would ever change.

Then the ARU results came back, which changed things, but not necessarily for the better.

Earlier in March, Scott and Melinda had deployed two automatic sound recorders (ARUs), borrowed from Cornell, for about a week at several places within the "hot zone." The data had been sent to Ithaca for processing, which is time-consuming. The analyses were finally complete right as everyone was returning from the latest excursion to Moss Island. Evidently one of the units malfunctioned, so there was only one machine's worth of data. I was not actually privy to any of what transpired about this first hand, but I gather over the course of a couple of conference calls, some things were said, misstated, and/or misunderstood that lead to some heated discussions.

The starting point is this: the only ARU that recorded data yielded a large collection of mechanical banging sounds but nothing that passed the screens as a candidate double knock under the criteria developed by Cornell. None of the human double knock detections were in places or at times that put them near the operating ARU, so no cross checking was possible. This was disappointing, but given a single deployment by only one machine this isn't really surprising. But then it all got complicated. Somehow things were said or construed, and then related to me on down through the telephone game, that left me with the impression that the Cornellians had concluded that we couldn't tell a double knock from a hole in the ground, and all we'd been hearing was these random mechanical noises that we were imagining were double knocks. This was, to say the least, kind of insulting. When I asked about the double knock that had been heard by one of their own crew, the (again second or third hand) answer I got was that Leighton had said he didn't know what he had heard. Apparently it was never quite as bad as it sounded to me, and it was mostly straightened out in a few days, But it reminded me of something that my wife's boss at a Federal environmental research lab had told her about science in Academia and government. Fair warning: I am going to use a time-honored four-letter Anglo Saxon word, unaltered and undisguised. The story really doesn't work as well if you sanitize it.

If you are a scientist at any sort of institution, you have three crocks of shit in front of you. One of them is your own shit, one is your friends' shit, and one is everyone else's shit. No matter what kind of scientist you are, your official position has to be that your own shit is gold, your friends' shit is silver, and everyone else's shit is shit. But if you are in Academia, you have to do more than just say this. You have to actually *believe* it.

Before anyone thinks I am accusing Cornell of being unusually and inordinately difficult, proprietary, or dismissive, think about your own dealings with groups, teams, and institutions under situations of pressure and frustration. These sorts of conflicts are extremely common, downright normal. It's just the way people are. The Man Behind the Curtain at the FWS (yes, there is one; let's call him "Jacob") and I talked over this situation a fair bit. He reminded me that there was a lot of frustration all across the region, with every crew feeling stuck in the rut of finding "something but not enough." Still, even though there were disagreements, on the whole the projects were doing a pretty good job of cooperating and sharing information internally, even if this was still being kept mostly out of the public eye. He also reassured me that as far as he could tell, Scott and Bob had successfully clarified the situation and the Tennessee position. To this day, though, there have been no further field collaborations between the Arkansas and Tennessee projects since all this came down.

Putting all the institutional drama aside, let's look at some of our own shit from Moss Island. I've heard 12 of the ARU samples. Most of them are clearly what I now call the "river noises," the off-site banging sounds that seem to mostly be associated with barge traffic on the Mississippi. Some of this is also from truck traffic on Highway 88 and Great River Road. A typical example is this (click the sonogram for a larger image, click the link below it to hear the audio):

Listen to the audio clip

Three things to note here:

1. The bangs themselves: They are generally long-echoing. They are very loud for the most part, and several kilometers away, so there's a lot of reverberation going on en route to your ears or your microphone. On the sonogram this shows as a long rightward smear of the signature. Also note how they are fairly "tall," covering a broad range of frequencies.

2. The pattern of the bangs: They tend not to occur in isolation. One loud BANGang is going to be preceded and followed by a bunch of other bangs in other patterns.

3. The other sounds: Associated with the bangs are various whining and churning sounds, which show in the sonogram as horizontal lines that fade in and out. These are motors and such.

This specific example is some of the "river noises," but similar things apply to human-made noises in general, be they gunshots, construction sounds, vehicles, etc. They tend to be associated with other human noises and recur in patterns that make their origins clear. These sounds are very familiar to us; they are not what we have been calling double knocks. Of the 12 clips I was provided, 9 represent these "river noises." All were recorded between 9:09 and 9:26 a.m. on March 6, 2008; in other words they all represent one single 17-minute long event. I've heard many of these events. They all come from the same direction (west), are nearly always accompanied by audible engine sounds, and are very easy to identify and eliminate as being of no interest at all.

This next clip is a "bridge whump," the sound made by a heavy vehicle passing over the expansion joints on one of the many highway bridges within a couple of miles of Moss Island. It was recorded on March 8, 2008 at 6:41 a.m.:

Listen to the audio clip

As the sonogram shows, this is actually a fairly mushy sound. It isn't crisp and sharp like the "real thing" would be. This mushiness is noticeable to the ear as well -- they sound distant and sort of muffled. You can also hear, and faintly see, the long trailing echo again, typical of loud, distant human-caused mechanical sounds and gunshots.

One more clip illustrates some other interesting features. This was recorded on March 11, 2008 at 3:35 p.m., the afternoon of the day on which I heard my first double knocks. Scott, Melinda and I were all sitting quietly at Hushpuckett Lake at this time, hearing nothing of interest:

Listen to the audio clip

This is the only one of the 12 clips I was provided with that even required a second listen. Sometimes, depending on your headphones and software, you will hear something that sounds rather like a woodpeckery double knock in the middle. Two things to note about this clip:

1. The spectrum of the knocks or bangs is different than the mechanical bangs shown before. It is focused in a narrower range of frequencies, centered in this case around 400 Hz. It also lacks the long, smeary trailing echo. This low, narrow frequency range is what gives real double knocks their resonant, sonorous, woody quality. Just to make matters confusing, a similar effect can also be produced by whacking on the hull of a boat, or banging your boat in to a tree. It's a predominance of lower frequencies with a fairly distinct peak at a specific tone, as compared to the mechanical bangs (and gunshots) that include much more high-frequency sound and not such a strong dominant pitch. The two loudest knocks in the middle of the sonogram are actually not that bad of a match for a "real" double knock, in terms of quality and timing, though the second knock is a bit high in pitch compared to the first one.

2. There are multiple other knocks in this clip, all within a little more than a half second. The pair that can sound like a double knock are the second and third notes. About 0.5s before them (just to the right of the vertical bar marking 6.0s in the sonogram) there is a fainter but distinctly audible knock; right after the pair are two other faint knocks that to the ear get swallowed by the middle louder sounds: "knock......KNOCKNOCKockknock." It is impossible to tell if these sounds are all from the same source, since the ARU gives you no information at all about direction and no real clues as to distance. If you isolate just this one second of the clip and play it in a continuous loop with the volume turned up, you can hear all five of these knocks and the superficial similarity to a double knock fades quickly. To a live observer hearing the sound in person, I suspect all that extra banging would have been more evident and it would not have come across as a double knock at all. My guess as to the source of these sounds is either one or two loudly foraging Pileateds, or a distant boat banging through the woods.

I have never been a big fan of Robobirders, like ARUs and automatic cameras. To me the absence of all the extra contextual data you get from a real, live person is a near-fatal flaw. The advantage of continuous surveillance and an "objective" record to me is largely outweighed by the time- and resource-consuming nature of the data processing and the ambiguous nature of all these "objective" results, mandating a massive amount of "subjective" (and controversial) interpretation. A large investment in time and resources has gone into robobirding for Ivorybills in recent years, resulting in only a modest amount of data the significance of which no one can agree on. For the most part it has yielded exactly what the human beings have produced: mysterious sounds of indefinite origin, and visuals that might suggest but come nowhere near proving. I realize they have their use as a compliment to the in-the-flesh field observations; but when the robots begin to take precedence over the humans that just isn't right.

Some might argue that this very ability to look at the sonograms and analyze their detailed characteristics is exactly why they are more valuable that reports from observers. But in fact, the Cornell analysts were not able to identify the sounds in those first two clips as anything but "mechanical sounds" of undetermined origin. I can identify them as "river sounds" and "bridge whumps" because of my actual "subjective" human experience at the site. And I would argue strongly that all these distinctions that can be picked out from the spectrogram are even more obvious to the ear of an experienced, skilled, discriminating observer (the only kind of people we should be fielding on these expeditions). All of these sounds are vastly bigger, richer, and more complex than what gets picked up by the RoboBirders and visualized on the sonogram. The live observer perceives, processes, and incorporates all this additional information. Ideally s/he also manages to capture a recording of what s/he observed; but lacking this does not mean that his/her observation is meaningless, or even less valuable than an ARU clip or crappy blurry video. I could just as well argue that the ARU data are meaningless because they are not corroborated by the experience and judgement of a skilled live observer.

Though I will get in to this more towards the end of my saga, we did eventually manage to get a recording of an example of the sounds that we live observers had been calling "Campephilus-like double knocks." Though disagreement continues about the origin of those sounds, I would like the record to reflect that all who have heard the recording have agreed that they are indeed dead ringers for the "real thing" as best as can be determined, both to the ear and on the sonogram. So it seems that even we Tennesseans with our fallible human ears actually can tell the difference between potential double knocks and the plethora of other possible confusion sounds.

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Irrational Exuberance

The Mass Invasion had only fanned the flames of the frenzy we had already been in. As seems to be the norm, it yielded neither The Prize nor nothing. Scott in particular was trying to make plans like a mad man while also getting more field time in himself. As he put it, it was hard to leave that swamp unattended.

Once again, the Big Question loomed: What the hell is really going on here? We remained at a loss for a simple, ordinary explanation for the double knocks and their pattern of occurrence. And now we had our very own "brief glimpse" sighting to add to the "intriguing audio encounters." Our story was so much like all the others -- Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, you name it. Our hot zone seemed as hot as any of the others, especially considering our limited person-power and that this had not even been going on for four weeks. In terms of spatial extent, our "detections" (of whatever it was) were even more tightly clustered than was typical, so far spanning only about 1 km from southernmost to northernmost. This raised thoughts that we hesitated to speak out loud.

The wildest possibility, of course, was that we might have stumbled into a nesting territory (of a bird we had not yet even definitely seen...). At the very least it suggested there might be a bird regularly roosting within a quite small area; the one DK heard by Scott and Melinda 20 minutes before sunset sure did suggest this possibility. Leafout was fast approaching; spring migrants were already trickling in and buds were cracking. Scott figured we had two weeks left to get the bird before the canopy closed and the mosquitoes came out. Everyone was pretty hyped up.

Underneath all this exuberance was the constant, droning self-reminder that we did not actually know what we were hearing, we had no definitive evidence of anything, all we had were strange sounds in the woods. I began referring to the object of the quest as the "Moss Island Mystery Double Knocker (Whatever It Is)" which I will abbreviate as MIMDKWTFII from here on. But, given the magnitude of what it would mean if it turned out that our wild hopes were actually true and the MIMDKWTFII really was an Ivorybill, or even a pair of Ivorybills, we felt compelled to act as though this hope were fact. This meant get the bird. Nail that sucker down. Don't let it get away. Never mind that larger crews with far more time to work with had failed repeatedly in the exact same quest in other places. You have to act as though you will be the lucky ones otherwise failure is guaranteed.

Meanwhile, the water continued to rise slowly. It had entered firmly into the zone of maximum inconvenience: too high to drive or hike, but not high enough to avoid cumbersome portages. Scott discovered the full reality of this when it took him two hours each way to get from his truck to Rhodes Lake, paddling, dragging, and portaging. On the plus side, Highway 88 was flooded and closed, meaning no traffic and no truck noises. Plus the turkey hunters were pretty much flooded out of the woods as well, so no gunshots either.

Scott worked out a plan with the Arkansas project for some of their full-time staff to come spend 4 or 5 days at Moss Island, doing things their way. I raised an eyebrow or two at the impression that they were helicoptering in for the glory at the end of the battle, but of course it had much more to do with the fact that we had something (whatever it was) going on while they had pretty much nothing going on in Arkansas. Also, their high water was much harder to work with than ours. Initially Scott and Allan Mueller of the Arkansas Nature Conservancy were going to be the only non-Cornell people on the crew, then it was going to be Allan for half the week and me for the other half of the week, then it wound up being both Allan and me for the whole time, then I'm not sure what the final plan was. I was set to arrive back on site on the afternoon of April Fool's Day.

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High Water

April 2, 2008

Wam-bam!

There they went again. Every time the Cornellians let loose with the double knock simulator, the first one always made me jump in the instant before I reminded myself what it really was. At the beginning of the day I found them quite exciting, but by midday I had begun to find them a bit disturbing. They went off every hour on the hour, 7 simulations 10 seconds apart,. After a few cycles of that I started to worry about any real bird that might be in the area -- what would it make of this sudden invasion of double knockers?

The first set I had heard were late, coming at 9:15 instead of the scheduled time. Hence it took until the second or third whack before my pulse slowed back down. The resemblance between the simulated double knocks and what I had actually heard on March 11 was close enough to give me even more reason to get all goose-pimply about that first incident. The simulations were not dead ringers; the "real" sounds I had heard had been notably louder and more resonant -- more boom and less whack, as it were. But it was a pretty good approximation. Assuming that the simulator had been designed by experts to give a reasonable imitation of the real Campephilus double knock, that made the MIMDKWTFII all the more engrossing. Over the course of the day as I heard the simulations at the top of each hour, I also noticed that they were less consistent than the "real" series I had heard on the 11th. The spacing between the knocks was not so precise, and there were some distinct "double klunkers" in the mix where something obviously went wrong with the swing of the striker and the sound that came out was a serious dud.

I had arrived the previous afternoon, laden with gear for three or four nights in the field. The water was much higher than on my last visit, and it took me several hours to shuttle my heap-o-crap from the Great River Road to the barn. The road into the WMA was about 50% flooded, so I alternately pulled my kayak behind me as a barge, then carried all my stuff across the dry stretches, portaged the boat, and repeated the cycle. It took a whole lot of iterations of this before I had tent, sleeping gear, food, water, and boat all transfered the mile from my truck to the camp. A small tent city was already set up in the lawn around the Barn, as the Cornell Crew had arrived the day before (there's a happy group photo at the bottom of the linked page; about half of that crew made the trip to Moss Island). Scott had assured me that on teardown day there would be a john boat and an outboard to shuttle all the gear back out to the levee, so I wouldn't have to repeat the slog. The one remaining glitch was getting my truck to safe parking. By all accounts any vehicle left parked along the levee road overnight would be broken in to and stripped by morning, if it was still even there. So the plan was that at the end of the first day Scott and I would caravan to the motel in Dyersburg where he had home base set up, I'd leave my truck there, and he would give me a ride back to Moss Island the next morning.

After getting camp set up I then headed off in the kayak towards Rhodes Lake. On the way I encountered Allan Mueller who was waiting for Scott, and Scott who was happily floating on the edges of Rhodes Lake. As it got to near 5:00 p.m. Scott and I headed back out the flooded road. I kept finding myself busting my ass to try to keep up with Scott, until I realized he was half my age and a jock and there was no point in even trying! There was only one road anyway, we'd all wind up in the same spot. So it was just hike, wade, hike, wade, repeat, back to the vehicles and onward to the Comfort Inn for an overpriced bed.

This morning, Scott and I had arrived at the Barn around 7:30, and found Tonya waiting for us with marching orders. Unfortunately we were short one radio, so I headed into the swamp incommunicado. I spent the day floating and paddling quietly around Forked and Hushpucket Lakes, racking up huge woodpecker tallies -- 35 Redbellies, 24 Downies, 16 Red-headeds, 7 Hairies, 9 Sapsuckers, 23 Flickers, and an incredible 28 Pileateds. Just one species lacking, sigh. That Pileated total would have to represent damn near theoretical maximum possible density for the species! Whether or not this would be marginal habitat for an Ivorybill, it was clearly core habitat for every other species of woodpecker of the eastern deciduous forest biome. I also tallied "blond bearded guy in canoe" passing within 50 m of me as I sat on stealthy watch twice during the day; this turned out to be Abe.

The areas I was paddling through represented the terrain from which three of our detections of the MIMDKWTFII had emanated. I had not actually entered these woods before. One of my primary objectives for the day (aside from gettin' th' frikkin' bird) was to see these forests up close. The trees were not impressively large, but there was indeed a lot of dead wood. In particular there seemed to be one species that grew tall but not especially straight, with distinctive bark, that tended to have a lot of dead wood near the top. Good spots for making double knocks from, perhaps? I didn't recognize what species of tree this was, however, in its leafless state.

At 5:00, after I had been floating in Forked Lake for several hours, I noticed that there were no 5 p.m. double knock simulations. I took this as a sign that it was time to head in for the day. I paddled along the road to the edge of the swamp, beached my kayak, and hiked back to the barn. I rounded the bend and came in sight of the house and the barn and got very confused.

The Cornell tent city was gone. Approaching moderate freak-out, I continued on down the road. I was relieved to find Tonya, Abe, and Leighton sitting on the back porch of the evacuated house. They explained that Scott had cancelled the next day's field work because of forecasts of severe weather, and the crew was bugging out for Dyersburg for at least the next 36 hours. And, of course, as I had been radio-less they had not been able to tell me this and had to just wait for me to come out of the woods on my own. I just kind of stood there dumbfounded and snarling trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do now. Staying there alone for two days with no communication, no vehicle, behind a mile of floodwaters, and no other people within 8 miles of me did not seem tenable. I was also a bit miffed that the plan had been scrubbed because of a FORECAST for possible severe weather. One thing I had learned as a trucker, you don't make plans around weather forecasts more than a few hours in advance. Trying to outsmart the storm was just as likely to land you smack in the middle of it when, as was inevitable, 6 or 12 hours later the forecast shifted. What you did was you made your plan, and you prepared for and responded to the adverse weather when, where, and if it happened. After all it was Tennessee in early April, of COURSE there would be some big thunderstorms around! One might also ponder which was actually safer in a tornado: a tent in an open lawn or a motel in a state without building codes? It was too late then to do anything but gripe about decisions already made (which I did, loudly, to the point that I think the Cornellians might have been getting afraid of me...).

The only course of action was to hurriedly pack up my heap-o-crap and 4 days worth of supplies, slog it all back out to the road, and ride back to Dyersburg with the gang. Fortunately the Cornell crew was well-hardened after a long season in the Big Woods, so they made a very capable tear down crew and team of pack mules to help get all my junk out to the levee in one trip. Only my boat was left behind. I could not see spending the next day and a half in the Comfort Inn, particularly since I was not yet entirely confident that money for reimbursement would really be forthcoming; I'd wound up eating my expenses for the little bit of work I had done on 2007. I decided I'd just head out the next morning, retrieve my boat, and drive home. At least I had one good (if Campephilusless) day in the field to show for my effort, and renewed confidence that we really might not be entirely wasting our time on this quest.

Once in the motel I just wanted to get clean, dry, and calmed down. I headed straight for the shower; on emerging I heard a knock at the door. Pulling on my jeans, I found that Leighton apparently had been picked or volunteered for "go asked the scary pissed-off local guy if he wants to go get dinner" duty. Maybe they figured I'd be less likely to attack a fellow longbeard (cue the music: "There is a brotherhood of beards! A benevolent brotherhood of beards!"). Finding a shirt that did not smell like a wet horse, I decided to join the crew.

Earlier, Tonya and the guys had mentioned to me back at the barn that Scott had a possible encounter he wanted to talk to me about; I hadn't been able to give it much attention in the scramble over what to do with my heap-o-crap. Now, gathered around the table at one of Dyersburg's collection of standard-issue freeway exit chain "family restaurants," one of the first things Scott asked me was "Where were you at 9:18 this morning?" I pointed at Abe and said "On Forked Lake listening to his double knock simulations." Scott and the rest of the crew looked puzzled, because the sims were supposed to have been at 9:00. Abe explained that he had been late because it had taken him a while to find a suitable tree and get set up. Now Scott looked concerned. He had heard a distant but clear double knock at 9:18 by his watch. He had been stationed about 1km west of me, which would have been about 1200m west of Abe, and to him the sound seemed to originate from his south, about 400m away by his estimate.

Now we had a conundrum. Simulations at 9:15 (finishing at 9:16) by my GPS time, versus DK heard at 9:18 by Scott's watch. Both timepieces were in general accurate to within a few seconds of each other, as Scott regularly synchs his watch with his GPS. Sound coming from due east versus from due south. Strange things do happen with perceptions of the directions of sounds. I know in my case, since my right ear still has the hearing it had when I was 18 but my left ear has the hearing of the middle-aged man I actually am, faint sounds can be frustratingly difficult for me to localize unless I get to hear them repeatedly. Scott is still a spring chicken, however, and all my time with him indicated he didn't have any of these hearing problems. Plus, 400m is not all that distant for a sound this loud. Scott was completely confident both in his time stamp and the direction; Abe and I agreed on the start time for his simulations and that it had been the standard series finishing after one minute.

Yet again, what do we make of this? Did Scott hear a response to the simulations? Or did he hear an echo or misjudge the direction by 90 degrees, combined with inaccurate timekeeping on somebody's part? Or was it some other coincidental sound that happened to do a good imitation of a double-knocking woodpecker and happened to come 2-3 minutes after the simulations? If Scott did hear an independent sound, then he did not hear the simulations at all. Would a woodpecker respond to a simulation that is too faint for a human to notice? This is part of the problem with the simulations. Whether or not they have ever triggered a response from an Ivorybill is unknown. But they do complicate the interpretation of sounds that are heard around times when they are being conducted. In theory this can be dealt with by having all field parties in real-time radio contact; in reality finding easily portable field-worthy radios that work reliably through over 1 km of forest without a repeater has proven difficult (perhaps impossible). This is not the last time this issue would come up.

After that discussion I had settled down enough to be sociable. One of the other bits of the conversation from the evening was related by me last year (in somewhat obfuscated terms) in this post. By now it should be clear what birding milestone I would consider having permanently inked into my body. For the record, by the way, I remain ink-free (dammit). The gang hatched a plan for how they were going to spend the forecast rainout; I won't spill the beans on them for fear of damaging their reputations irreparably but it sure as hell was not the sort of thing I was keen on doing. It sounded like they were not planning to get out in the swamp for another day or even two, which confirmed my decision to just go retrieve my boat in the morning, call it a wash, and head home. Which I did.

Rhodes Lake Road

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