"...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

It Can All Be a Bit Maddening

Two historic reports from our area, from a list of 21 on www.birdwatchingdaily.com/featured-stories/historic-ranges-of-ivory-billed-woodpeckers/:

15.  Black Creek, DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi, 1978
Observers:  Ornithologists Ronald Sauey, the late co-founder of the International Crane Foundation,
and Charles Luthin, executive director of the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin.  Notable:
Sauey heard a bird that "sounded every bit like the historic Ivory-bill recording of Allen and Kellogg."

16.  Pascagoula River, Mississippi, February 1982
Observer:  Birder Mary Morris of Biloxi, Mississippi

Sauey is, of course, "late."  A cursory search yields no information on "Birder Mary Morris."  Probably late, too.

Now I have to go to work at my "regular" job.  Ye gods, sometimes I hate being poor.


The upper Pascagoula River, near Merrill.

No comments:

Post a Comment