"...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, March 22, 2016

Seasonal Issues: 19 March 2016

I traveled down to the Pascagoula WMA last Saturday, hoping to find some dry ground in the Hutson Lake sector.  My plan was to stake out, for several hours, a large red oak that had been struck by lightning, spotted by my brother Brian last year; it was found at our last inspection to be partly dead.  I arrived well before dawn to find the Pascagoula River, swollen with recent Spring rains, had rather spectacularly overflowed its banks.  The surrounding swamp and bottomland forest was completely flooded, all the way to the highway.

Video taken at the beginning of the WMA road to Hutson Lake.

I had not brought my kayak, and at any rate was not too keen on navigating the wild tangle of flooded bottomland alone.  I regret days in the field lost, but sometimes one must simply let Nature make the decisions.

I do not expect to return to the Pascagoula Basin until possibly the week after Easter at earliest, due to the holiday and to some minor surgery I have to have next week.  For now, then, this part of old Ivorybill country will remain free of this particular meddling biped.


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