Mistflower: Horseshoe Lake, 5 November 2017

The phrase "looking for a needle in a haystack" -- a moving needle, at that -- has always been apt in describing our efforts to find and document Ivorybills in the Pascagoula River Swamp, due in part to the large amount of rugged territory involved.  On the other hand, the large area also means that, after well over three years of exploring, there are still places new to us, tucked in odd corners of the Basin that we have managed to overlook.

Poring over Google Earth last month (as I do almost daily), I noticed a small, tree-filled oxbow called Hog Pond, in the dead center of Big Swamp.  I have at one time or another surveyed the land both to the north of it -- Goff Dead River, in October 2015, and (along with my brother Brian) Big Swamp's  southeastern quadrant, in December of last year.  Hog Pond is extremely isolated and totally surrounded by bottomland, so I thought it a worth a look.  Brian and I decided that the best way to get to it would be to cross the Pascagoula from a landing on the east bank; beach the kayaks on a big sandbar directly across the River; then, proceed almost directly westward through the forest, a hike of less than a mile.

Hog Pond is in the center-left of this screenshot I took with my phone.  The nearest public landing we could find was at the small blue location dot; the upstream paddle of 1.5 miles to the sandbar would have likely left us a bit exhausted.

Unfortunately, we were not able to find easy access to the River near the sandbar, as the landings nearby were closed to the public.  Nearby Horseshoe Lake, off the east bank of the Pascagoula, appeared (on Google Earth, anyway) to perhaps connect to the River through one or perhaps both its ends.  We found that this was not so at this time of year, though no doubt the lake gets refreshed annually by the Pascagoula's overflow, and one could probably navigate the bottomland between the lake and the River by kayak at such time.  We never made it to Hog Pond that day, but surveyed Horseshoe Lake by kayak.

Access to Horseshoe Lake was no problem.

A high, sandy bank at the lake's lower end separates it from the Pascagoula.  The bluff overlooking the River is a wild tangle of brush, a black willow grove, and broken timber.

I'm glad we did.  The lake is not shaped so much like a horseshoe -- more like a ladle, or a fishhook; a quiet, elegant child of the Pascagoula's ancient wanderings.  The surrounding mature bottomland and swamp forest is beautiful and invites further exploration, especially a swampy area to the lake's immediate east.  As we had already spent an inordinate amount of time driving around, we had to save that investigation for another day.

Horseshoe Lake launch.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

I found on our last kayaking trip that repairs I'd made to my kayak, the Kuhn, had not worked, and that it was still taking on water through a crack in the hull near the stern.  This time I used Krazy Glue, which seemed to do the trick.  This latest repair held; I hope it continues to do so.

Dawn shone silver through the misty swamp just to the east of the lake. 

The trees along the shoreline are magnificent!  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

Photo:  Brian Carlisle. 

 A family of four white ibises, lingering here very late in the year.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

We hauled the kayaks onto the thick muddy north end of Horseshoe Lake to explore on foot.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 Dry swamp forest past the lake's north end.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 Giant leopard moth caterpillar.  I remember people calling them "wooly bear" caterpillars when I was a kid growing up in rural Jasper County, Mississippi.

 Returning to the kayaks after exploring the lake's north end.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 A lone anhinga was one of the few birds beside the ibises we observed.  Anhingas and cormorants in flight always give me pause.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 Rounding the bend along the lake's southwestern shoreline.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

 Can you see the anhinga here?  Me, neither.  It is not impossible to get a good photo of a bird from a kayak, but it can be quite a challenge.

 A baldcypress with the bark stripped off.  We've seen this kind of work before in the Pascagoula River Basin, and can usually attribute it to gray squirrels.

Trying to get the Kuhn still long enough to photograph these cavities through the trees was maddening.  There were many, many cavities in the trees within eyeshot, though we didn't see any woodpeckers.

 The high-water mark is evident.  

White ibis, upper right.

Brian couldn't help but note the fascinating, twisted shapes of the trees.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

Blue mistflower.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

A warmer than average autumn has bought the spiders a little extra hunting time.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

Crossing back to the landing.  Photo:  Brian Carlisle.

We drove around a little bit afterward before heading to the Benndale Super Stop for our usual meal of their excellent chicken strips.  Though we neither saw nor heard anything directly suggestive of Ivorybills on this trip, I hope to return to Horseshoe Lake and explore the surrounding area on foot.

As a bonus, I returned home with a souvenir of the swamp, a work of art by the Pascagoula River:

I found it in a mad jumble of driftwood atop the sandy ridge between Horseshoe Lake and the River.  It now hangs on the wall by my desk at home, where I have written so much about our experiences in the swamps and bottomlands.

I am not a materially wealthy man; but I'm one of the luckiest people I know, to be able to search for one of the rarest and most spectacular birds, in some of the most serenely beautiful wilderness on Earth.  My only regret so far is that I didn't start sooner.

Singer Tract, April '35.

Surveilling the Leaf Wilderness, 14 October 2017

Going into the fall search season, I determined to spend greater time in still hunts in some of the more promising Ivorybill habitat we have surveyed.  Towards that end, I recently spent nearly three hours sitting on a baldcypress hip in the 900+ acre Leaf Wilderness Area.  I pass by the Wilderness regularly on my trips to the Pascagoula River Swamp, but this was the first time I'd set foot there in nearly three years.  There one may pass through four woodland types between the highway and the Leaf River (a major tributary of the Pascagoula River):  first, upland pine forest; then a thin band of slope forest along an old river bluff; islands of bottomland hardwoods; and tupelo-baldcypress swamp forest, which comprises most of the area of the Wilderness.  It is all mostly mature second growth, with at least two relict baldcypresses that my brother Brian and I discovered when we first explored the area in 2014.

I got there well after dawn on what would become a clear, warm (70s-80s) day.  I had originally intended to surveil an area much farther south, in Elephant Man Swamp, in the Stronghold sector of the northern Pascagoula WMA; but there were many hunters there, and I had not worn any orange.  There were no hunters in the Leaf Wilderness when I drove back up there.  I hiked through the strip of pine woods, past the neglected visitor center, and over the railroad tracks; then, through the narrow band of slope forest, and into the swamp.  I moved very slowly, taking about an hour before reaching Treebeard, a relict baldcypress some 300 yards into the Wilderness.

Site (the blue dot) of my still hunt, by the relict baldcypress "Treebeard."

 Bigleaf magnolia near rotting pine snag near the visitor center.

 Moving into the slope forest from the railroad tracks.

 Pine and white oak are plentiful in the narrow band of slope forest.

 Despite what this photo might suggest, it is relatively easy moving through the slope forest.

 The slope forest ends rather abruptly, and the swamp begins.

 Woodpecker work on a hollow tupelo.

 The water here was shallow enough to make slow, steady progress possible.

 I encountered no snakes in the Wilderness that day, though my brother and I had found cottonmouths to be plentiful here on prior visits.

 I found Treebeard again with little difficulty.

 Treebeard is not the largest relict baldcypress we have found in the Pascagoula River Basin, but he was the first.

 What became my seat for the better part of three hours.  It became only moderately uncomfortable.

 I only noticed this frog sitting nearby after I'd been in place over thirty minutes.  He sat with me for most of my stay.

 My view facing west through the swamp, back towards the slope forest.

I watched a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on a cavity in a nearby baldcypress.  They moved about my area, calling and clucking to one another.  I heard other pileateds nearby, as well as flickers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and downy woodpeckers.

Though I neither saw nor heard anything suggestive of Ivorybills that day, the variety of mature forest types within the Leaf Wilderness, as well as its rather strategic location between the vast upland pine woods of the DeSoto National Forest and the Pascagoula River Swamp -- not to mention the sighting by Jack Merritt in December of 1960, somewhere in the vicinity -- make it worthy of more still hunts in the future.

"Others hold out hope."

Stallings combing the Delta for the ivory-billed woodpecker

By William Browning, News Editor
Recreated with the permission of The Greenwood Commonwealth
Friday, January 4, 2008 

Jim Stallings is combing Delta forests trying to find a strikingly sleek, smooth, powerful bird that no human eye has officially seen in more than 60 years.

"When I'm deer hunting, instead of hunting deer I'm sitting there looking for that bird," the 49-year-old Greenwood native said in a tone that half mocked his new passion.

Stallings admits that he wasn't looking for the fabled, elusive ivory-billed woodpecker 20 years ago, "but had I known about it, I probably would have been."

It's been an endangered species since 1967. The last authentic documented sighting came out of northwestern Louisiana in 1944. Some scientists fear that the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct. Others hold out hope.

"Some people believe that there may be a few left," said Nick Winstead, an ornithologist with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science in Jackson. "Some people think they're out there lingering in scattered areas."

In some circles, the bird has attained Elvis-like status. Each year, reports of a sighting bob to the surface, though none have been verified. Even a 2004 sighting in Arkansas that came with a four-second video failed to trigger across-the-board acceptance of its existence; it only stoked the verve of amateur bird watchers and scientists alike.

"It is certainly a very compelling piece of evidence," Dr. Martjan Lammertink, an ornithologist at Cornell University, said of the footage. Many consider Lammertink, 36, the world's leading expert on large woodpeckers. "Since then there have been a lot of follow-up searches. And people are fanning out those searches."

Count Stallings, who is working toward a degree in sociology at Delta State University, as one of the ivory-billed woodpeckers' new devotees.

"I grew up in the outdoors," said Stallings, who retired from the United States Air Force in 2005 after 22 years of service. "But for a long time I didn't know that much about birds. I knew they flew and that you shoot ducks. That was it."

But when he enrolled in Dr. Mark Bonta's "Environmental History of the Delta" geography course, all that changed.

"We had to do a research paper, and it was between doing mine on water conservation or these birds," Stallings said. "I could have done it on water conservation and been done with it. That would have been easy. But I thought about it and decided that it was time to tackle something that everybody would benefit from."

According to Winstead, Stallings' decision to focus his search in the Delta is as good as any.

"Certainly in the past, the Delta would have been a prime habitat for them," said Winstead, 28. "The birds needed large patches of forests where dead wood could be found."

The birds could find the larvae of wood beetles, their chief food source, in dead wood - "but after colonization, most of that habitat was eliminated," he said.

Winstead added that the stretch of land between the two levees on the Mississippi River offers locations that the bird could possibly frequent.

"Every time I go out looking for it, I want to go more and more," Stallings said. "Yeah, you could say I'm hooked."

Stallings' quasi-obsession with the woodpecker, which averages a 30-inch wingspan and 20-inch-long body, doesn't surprise Lammertink.

"It is an absolutely stunning bird," said Lammertink, who in 2007 marched a mobile search team across five Southeastern states in search of the bird. "It is the biggest North American woodpecker; a powerful, fine, graceful animal; awe-inspiring. That is definitely part of the appeal."

Another appeal, Lammertink said, is that the bird is near extinction. Still there is a glimmer of hope that some remain.

For the past three weeks Stallings has been loading up his gear, heading into Delta forests and praying to see - or at least hear the distinctive "double-knock" of - an ivory billed woodpecker.

To remind himself how the bird's distinctive knock sounds, Stallings carries with him a 1935 recording made in deep-woods Louisiana by Arthur Allen, who was head of the Cornell ornithology lab.

So far, Stallings' search has led him through Morgan's Brake, Tallahatchie County, Dahomey, Malmaison, Delta National Park, Panther Swamp, Anderson Tully, Mahannah and St. Catherine Creek. Down the road, he plans to branch out through the Desoto National Forest, the Pascagoula River and the Bogue Chitto River.

"Just to know that the bird is alive and continues to live, that would be enough for me," Stallings said, admitting that he hasn't had any luck so far. "Maybe it will be me who finds it; maybe it will be someone else. I don't care. Just having it back would be enough."

Winstead, who has worked for the Museum of Natural Science for three years, was a bit more candid.

"It would be very cool if he could find one."

Source:  http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/more_info/CommonwealthArticle