IBWOH: Chris Carlisle.
Summary: I returned on an unusually warm and muggy day to the far south of the Pascagoula Wildlife Management Area (PWMA), hoping to explore the bottomland and swamp forest north of Lice Lake. I arrived just before dawn, and was able to drive over halfway to the lake, where I had discovered a trail late last year. Unfortunately, deep water overflowing from nearby Boggy Slough blocked my passage to the lake. Although I had brought my kayak, Boggy Slough does not flow near Lice Lake, and I was of no mind to navigate the flooded forest alone. I decided that I would explore Boggy Slough on foot, while I was in the area.
The forest there is primarily younger bottomland, interspersed here and there by mature cypress-tupelo swamp forest. Numerous deadfalls led me to think that the area suffered more from Katrina than areas further north in the Pascagoula River Swamp. My route took me along Boggy Slough for a while; then, following an old logging road, I came to Sandy Slough.
But you know, after a day that so far had not yielded anything of interest, I couldn't leave empty-handed; and we'd been anxious to see what (if anything) the camera had recorded. So:
The procedure took about 15 minutes. I still wonder if the rabbit hunter had spied me clinging for dear life to the tree, and what he might have thought about that.
I finally got home a couple of hours later. I whisked the camera inside, leaving all my other gear in the truck. I opened the camera to retrieve the memory card, and found this:
Rusty brown water spilled out of it onto the kitchen counter. The lower battery posts had corroded. At some point over the past month, the water level in Elephant Man Swamp had risen even higher than it had been the day we set the camera, and the unit was at some point at least partially submerged. Without much hope, I took out the memory card and inserted it into my desktop computer: sure enough, it held no data, nothing. The game camera is ruined.
Conclusions: At this point Brian and I are ill-disposed to invest in a new camera, and will probably return to good old-fashioned stalking and simply staking out promising woodpecker cavities and feeding sites.
Some say there is no such thing as the Curse of the Ivorybill. As for me and my brother, though, we believe.
Summary: I returned on an unusually warm and muggy day to the far south of the Pascagoula Wildlife Management Area (PWMA), hoping to explore the bottomland and swamp forest north of Lice Lake. I arrived just before dawn, and was able to drive over halfway to the lake, where I had discovered a trail late last year. Unfortunately, deep water overflowing from nearby Boggy Slough blocked my passage to the lake. Although I had brought my kayak, Boggy Slough does not flow near Lice Lake, and I was of no mind to navigate the flooded forest alone. I decided that I would explore Boggy Slough on foot, while I was in the area.
The flooded road. I waded out until the water was nearly up to my knees -- too high for my Nissan Frontier to drive through.
I neither saw nor heard any other people in that part of the PWMA.
This large, V-shaped swamp chestnut oak (center-right) was among the few larger trees I encountered here. Elsewhere in the PWMA, especially in the north (Hutson Lake) sector, trees of this size and larger are much more common.
Along Sandy Slough.
Pileated woodpeckers are common in the Boggy Slough and Sandy Slough area, as they are in much of the PWMA.
At the limit of my hike.
Feeling a bit defeated, and having been generally unimpressed by the forest I'd explored, I got back in my truck and headed first east, then north, to Elephant Man Swamp, to retrieve the game camera my brother Brian and I had set exactly a month before.
A truck belonging to a rabbit hunter was parked near the trailhead, and his hounds yelped and bayed not far off; now and again one of the dogs passed through the woods nearby. I found the water in Elephant Man Swamp had receded somewhat since our last visit. I dragged the kayak on down to the slough and put in, expecting the going to be difficult; but the paddle downstream was as easy and uneventful as it had been before.
I found the tree soon enough: a large tupelo with an intriguing pair of cavities. Not seeing the camera, I panicked, thinking that it had been either stolen or somehow torn loose from the tree Brian and I had put it on.
Then, I looked up:
The water level in the swamp had fallen so much, the camera was now about 7-8 feet above my head, though it was still 4-5 feet deep, too deep for me to stand up in. Floating under the camera, seated in the kayak, I could barely touch it with one of my paddles.
I sat there for a few minutes, listening to the baying of the rabbit dogs in the distance, knowing what I had to do. I texted my brother, who was at work at the time:
The procedure took about 15 minutes. I still wonder if the rabbit hunter had spied me clinging for dear life to the tree, and what he might have thought about that.
I finally got home a couple of hours later. I whisked the camera inside, leaving all my other gear in the truck. I opened the camera to retrieve the memory card, and found this:
Rusty brown water spilled out of it onto the kitchen counter. The lower battery posts had corroded. At some point over the past month, the water level in Elephant Man Swamp had risen even higher than it had been the day we set the camera, and the unit was at some point at least partially submerged. Without much hope, I took out the memory card and inserted it into my desktop computer: sure enough, it held no data, nothing. The game camera is ruined.
Conclusions: At this point Brian and I are ill-disposed to invest in a new camera, and will probably return to good old-fashioned stalking and simply staking out promising woodpecker cavities and feeding sites.
Some say there is no such thing as the Curse of the Ivorybill. As for me and my brother, though, we believe.
It really isn't the bird that is the cause of the "curse." Even though we try to convey a sense of the utter wildness of these places where the birds may live many folks dont, on a visceral level, "get it." I said that to say this; technology is at best a fickle mistress. When technological devices are deployed under these harsh conditions, the technology inevitably fails, sooner or later. Don't let this setback get you down, these setbacks are in a real sense a gift from Mother Nature - one of her harsh teachable moments...
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