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 ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]