"...the ornithologists still had serious doubts. Sutton finally put it directly: 'Mr. Spencer, you're sure the bird you're telling us about isn't the big pileated woodpecker?'

"Spencer exploded. 'Man alive! These birds I'm tellin' you all about is kints!' he shouted in their faces. 'Why, the pileated woodpecker's just a little bird about as big as that.' He held his fingers a few inches apart. 'A kint's as big as that!' he said, holding his arms wide... 'Why, man, I've known kints all my life. My pappy showed 'em to me when I was just a kid. I see 'em every fall when I go deer huntin' down aroun' my place on the Tinsaw. They're big birds, I tell you, big and black and white; and they fly through the woods like pintail ducks!'

"After Spencer's outburst, the members of the team were all believers -- not just because of his vehemence, but because his description was so accurate. Ivory-bills do not have the typical bounding flight of the pileated woodpecker. They generally fly away high and straight, with stiff flight feathers, looking very much like a pintail, and their call is a distinctive nasal kent, kent, kent -- very similar to the local name Spencer used, kint. Sutton and the others couldn't wait to get to the bayou and start searching.

"As it turned out, that was not an easy proposition..." --Gallagher, Tim. The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, pp. 10-11: "Of People and Peckerwoods."

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Encounter on Black Creek, 1978

     "In 1978, ornithologists Ronald Sauey and Charles Luthin* visited southeast Mississippi to float Black Creek, a meandering blackwater stream that flows through DeSoto National Forest, eventually joining the Pascagoula River in extensive swamp forest.  On the second day of their float they heard what Sauey later wrote 'sounded every bit like the historic Ivory-bill recording of Allen and Kellogg.' The following is from Sauey's letter of February 2, 1978, to me:

     'On our second day of boating on the creek (floating without motor to be as quiet as possible) we found an amazing congregation of mixed species -- Brewer's [blackbird, Euphagus cyanocephalus], Rusty [blackbird, Euphagus carolinus], Redwings [red-winged blackbird], Orange-crowneds [warbler, Vermivora celata], Yellow-rumpeds [warbler, Dendroica coronata], etc., etc., etc., and dozens of woodpeckers.  We were probably moored... for about an hour when a couple of Pileateds flew in... and started up a ruckus.  Shortly after, we heard a very loud series of tappings from farther down the river and then a number of distinct musical calls, given repeatedly on the same pitch and reminding us both of a nuthatch [Sitta sp.], only louder and not as nasal.  The calls stopped, and then were repeated again, only closer this time to us.  The call sounded even less like a nuthatch the second time, being fuller and more resonant, and we both looked at each other in disbelief -- was it an Ivory-bill?... we never saw the creature making the call.'

     "Sauey's report, combined with reports of others, the vastness of the Pascagoula Swamp, and the history of ivory-billed woodpecker specimens collected in the area in the late 1800s all suggest that the swamp forests of southeast Mississippi hold promise for ivory-bills."

-- Jackson, Jerome A.  In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Washington:  Smithsonian Books, 2004):  178-179.

*Late co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, and executive director of the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, repectively (my note).


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