Once again, conditions--drier, quieter, less leafed-out--are getting
better for searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers. The Arkansas work is
of course continuing, as is that in a new site, the Choctawatchee River
in Florida. A fairly new source of information is the 53,000-acre Nokuse
Plantation in Florida, whose owners have been helpful to investigators.
See http://www.nokuse.org/ibwo.htm  .
        The author of the article on Ohio ivory-bills in the last issue of the
Ohio Cardinal, Ben Leese, a tireless researcher, now wishes he could
have more thoroughly examined evidence that ivory-billed woodpeckers
might have been more nomadic than is generally recognized, taking
advantages of burns and forests dying for other reasons, and with
therefore a more extensive and elastic range than might be expected of a
species devoted to a narrow habitat type. I think he would feel that
other forest types would be occupied, at least temporarily, if they
provided the necessary food.
        Ohio is included on some range maps for this species, but not on most.
It makes sense to me that this species would have been at least in part
a facultative feeder on beetles invading dying timber, rather than--as
we often read--an obligate species of mature southern swamp forests. If
this is so, even if ivory-bills may not have been a permanent denizen of
Ohio forests, they may rather have staged occasional incursions as
burns, ice damage, diseases, etc. encouraged outbreaks of the cerambycid
beetle larvae that showed up in the wood of trees damaged in these ways.
        This certainly fits with what we know of the more specialized North
American woodpecker species--black-backed or three-toed woodpeckers--who
are known to show up in numbers in areas on the fringes of their normal
ranges when conditions favor beetle infestations in trees. Interesting
stuff.
Bill Whan
Columbus

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