"...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."

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Area of Interest: Pascagoula Headwaters

Below is a map provided by the Nature Conservancy of the area under their protection that surrounds the Pascagoula River headwaters.  The southeast-flowing Leaf meets the south-southwesterly-flowing Chickasawhay near the community (if one can call it that) of Merrill.

The combined area of the Deaton, Fisher, and Murrah Preserves (totaling over 6,200 acres) meets the 37,000-acre Pascagoula Wildlife Management Area to the south, and the massive DeSoto National Forest (which includes the 900+ acre Leaf Wilderness, the 42,000-acre Leaf River Wildlife Management Area, and the 5,050-acre Black Creek Wilderness) to the west and southwest.  Altogether, over 91,000 acres of mostly pine plantation and bottomland hardwood forest, if my math is correct.  (The Singer Tract in Louisiana, where Tanner made his study of Ivory Bill, was around 81,000 acres.)

Where the Pascagoula is young.
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