Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Here's My Post from last winter about going to the Florida panhandle. I couldn't say then why I was going down there, but now that the news is out I thought I'd post something about it. My friend Tyler Hicks was working down at Auburn University doing breeding bird work when him and a couple others from their lab decided to look for some suitable Ivory-billed habitat. Looking at maps they found a nice spot along the Choctawhatchee River a few miles south of Ponce De Leon, FL. Mainly they wanted to see some big timber and just take a look around, but instead Tyler got an eyefull of an Ivory-billed flying overhead. Tyler called me and left a message that he had some good news. For some reason I knew. We had always talked about the woodpecker and knowing he was in the southeast I just had a feeling. When he told me he had seen one I had no doubts. I've been birding with Tyler for a long time and he has amazing skills. So during winter break I headed down to take a look for myself. Just before I arrived the search team had quite a few detections and even a video that had captured the IBWO's double-knock. It was quite a thrill to kayak through some very old cypress forest and spend time searching. I was content with that, but one morning I heard two double-knocks and nearly lost it! There was nothing else it could have been. I tried getting closer, but never got a glimpse of the double-knocker.

Here are the last known Ivory-bills found in the Singer Tract in Louisiana in the 30's.


There is still no undisputable evidence. The paper they wrote is called "Evidence Suggesting that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Campephilus principalis) Exist in Florida." They are being careful not to assert any kind of certainty. They learned from the Cornell paper that has been criticized.

The only other woodpecker that could make a similarly loud knock are the Pileated Woodpeckers, but they do not do the "double-knock" like Ivory-bills, so until it is proven that Pileateds are capable of doing that knock I will be convinced I heard an Ivory-billed. And I still have no doubts of what Tyler saw.

A pic of a cavity from the site.



Here is Geoff Hill's Auburn site about the search.

I'm in here somewhere.

Here is the University of Windsor's IBWO site. They did all of the sound data.

Happy Birthday Bilbo and Frodo!!!!!

Today is Bilbo and Frodo's birthday! Join me in a pint of Butterbur's best beer and a toke on a pipe of Old Toby and wish them the best!!


“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole and that means comfort.”

Bilbo's Birthday Song

Solar Energy

This week's Living On Earth had a good segment about solar power. I thought this little tidbit was interesting.

"Israel has actually a requirement on all new home construction to include a solar thermal system. Spain has the same requirement and Germany in fact has a strong demand for solar thermal systems. So just to give you some perspective, in the United States we are installing about 6,000 systems a year. In Germany they're installing 80-thousand systems per year, and in China they're installing 250-thousand solar water heating systems per year. So we are way behind the curve."

America is behind the curve? Whaaa? And with our government so worried about domestic energy.

And look at how much fun solar energy can be!

Solar Energy

Gluttony

Maybe this python's eyes were bigger than his stomach.

Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

One of my favorite sections of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

CATCH IT IF YOU CAN.

It is early March. I am dazed from a long day of interstate driving homeward; I pull in at a gas station in Nowhere, Virginia, north of Lexington. The young boy in charge ("Chick' at oll?") is offering a free cup of coffee with every gas purchase. We talk in the glass-walled office while my coffee cools enough to drink. He tells me, among other things, that the rival gas station down the road, whose FREE COFFEE sign is visible from the interstate, charges you fifteen cents if you want your coffee in a Styrofoam cup, as opposed, I guess, to your bare hands.

All the time we talk, the boy's new beagle puppy is skidding around the office, sniffing impartially at my shoes and at the wire rack of folded maps. The cheerful human conversation wakes me, recalls me, not to a normal consciousness, but to a kind of energetic readiness. I step outside, followed by the puppy.

I am absolutely alone. There are no other customers. The road is vacant, the interstate is out of sight and earshot. I have hazarded into a new corner of the world, an unknown spot, a Brigadoon. Before me extends a low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown lights. I have never seen anything so tremulous and live. Overhead, great strips and chunks of cloud dash to the northwest in a gold rush. At my back the sun is setting --how can I not have noticed before that the sun is setting? My mind has been a blank slab of black asphalt for hours, but that doesn't stop the sun's wild wheel. I set my coffee beside me on the curb; I smell loam on the wind; I pat the puppy; I watch the mountain. My hand works automatically over the puppy's fur, following the line of hair under his ears, down his neck, inside his forelegs, along his hot-skinned belly.

Shadows lope along the mountain's rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it ticks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retrack, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The ridge's bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment. The air cools; the puppy's skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world.

Shadows lope along the mountain's rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of spilling water, faster and faster. A warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As the purple vaults and slides, it ticks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock in gilt, in shape-shifting patches of glow. These gold lights veer and retrack, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The ridge's bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment. The air cools; the puppy's skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world.

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present... I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I've lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has chanaged for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip's stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat.

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator -- our very self-consciousness -- is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home.