Adventures in Faith-based Ornithology: A Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in South Mississippi
"...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."
It was announced this week that Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird and Imperial Dreams, may be laying the groundwork for a new book on another member of the Northern Triad of Campephilus species. He and Martjan Lammertink have begun a search in Cuba for the subspecies Campephilus principalis bairdii, the Cuban Ivorybill. This blog follows their search.
Mark Michaels of Project Coyote was recently interviewed on Heritage Radio Network about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The informative and enjoyable recording can be listened to here.
On Monday, 4 April, I attempted yet again to access the Hutson Lake area of the northern Pascagoula WMA. While the massive flooding I had encountered on my previous visit had subsided considerably, the small creeks and sloughs were still swollen to overflow. I arrived in the cool, clear hour before dawn, and was able to drive down the previously-submerged WMA road for about a mile, until I reached a dip where a small paved area of road bisects what is normally a dark, still slough. Instead, there was this:
I dared not chance flooding my truck attempting to cross. Despite the mosquitoes, which were out in full force, it would have been a beautiful day to explore. With heavy heart I turned around, and began the hour and a half-long drive back home.
A fence along a nearby natural gas pumping station hinted at the extent of the season's earlier flooding:
Unfortunately, this was to be my last opportunity to search for the Ivorybill for a while, since this past Friday I had surgery to repair a double inguinal hernia. I will be out of work for a couple of weeks while I recover; and it shall be at least that long before I can return to the wild swamp fastnesses of the Pascagoula River Basin, and resume my search for evidence of Ivorybills there.
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.
(Note: For now, at least, I am abandoning my old report format, which has been leaving me feeling rather hemmed in lately.)
I got back down to the southern Pascagoula Basin yesterday in hopes of exploring the Lice Lake area, only to find the whole south end of the WMA flooded. I did not expect the extent of the flooding, since south Mississippi had been rain-free at least a week prior. It was already some minutes after dawn when I arrived, and I wasted valuable time driving a couple of dead-end roads that had looked promising on Google Earth. The forecast called for rain by 10 a.m.
Parker's Lake straddles the Wade-Vancleave Road, and has a WMA headquarters building and a boat launch that is usually fairly busy. That day, there was only one pickup truck with empty boat trailer. The mature swamp forest along the road teases bigger woods further in on either side. After some deliberation, I elected to put the kayak in at the lake and make my way into the swamp and flooded bottomland forest to the north of the road.
It was only slightly cool, with little wind; the heavily overcast sky seemed to threaten rain at any minute. I sped along at a good clip against a gentle, southward-flowing current, and presently found myself amidst some simply gorgeous swamp forest.
I am by no means an expert on the Pascagoula River Swamp, but as I have gotten to know the place over the last couple of years, I have come to relate to it in some different ways. Trees and water dominate the landscape, and in my mind's eye I often look at the Swamp relative to them. Always on the lookout for older growth, I remember most such pockets, as well as larger individuals: the massive red oak, between the more massive baldcypress The Ancient of Days and the River; the great tupelos and baldcypresses of Titan Swamp; the lone grandfather cypress watching over the north of Big Swamp; too many special trees and groves to relate here, echoes of once-upon-a-time, which I have come to seek out with an eagerness eclipsed only by the desire to see an Ivorybill.
I found the swamp forest and flooded bottomland forest to the north of Parker's Lake to be such a special place, and remarkable in its own way. Here are grouped many relict (or near-relict) baldcypresses, in greater numbers than anywhere else I have yet found in the Basin. Drawn from giant to giant, I made my way nearly a mile into the largely silent swamp fastness, the sound of the road gradually fading behind me to a rumor.
Bird life was muted. I saw no woodpeckers of any species, and only heard Red-bellied Woodpeckers and a single Pileated; but evidence of Picidae was easily found, and there were many cavities, some of considerable size.
Hammerhead.
My trip was cut short by the threat of heavy rain, along with an overactive bladder. I hope to return to this place soon.
Summary: My brother Brian and I spent over two hours kayaking Little Lake and the surrounding swamp and flooded bottomland forest, just south of the Wade-Vancleave Road (between MS Highways 57 and 63) in Jackson County, Mississippi. The area is very near the site of a documented Ivorybill sighting in 1982, when birder Mary Morris of Biloxi observed two individuals (see Jerome Jackson, In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, pp. 179-180). Another sighting had occurred in the area about sixty years earlier:
"Locality G embraces the great Pascagoula Swamp, a compact unit, and one well deserving of a separate volume. On two successive days my friend, Mr. Hord, took me out by automobile to points beyond Vancleave whence we paddled in a dugout through miles of veritable fairyland, covering different routes each time. An uncharted wilderness, this vast swamp consists of a maze of interlacing bayous and lakes in which the unacquainted would be speedily lost. The land areas, most of which were under water at the time of our visit, are heavily timbered but without the tangle of undergrowth one might expect, and the water everywhere was completely free from debris, never stagnant, and entirely fit to drink. In the bayous, all of which connect up with the large central Pascagoula River and its branches, the water averaged some fifty feet in depth and afforded wonderful fishing. We saw alligators and swarms of turtles, but very few snakes indeed. Mr. Hord told me that the razorbacks which run wild in the swamp keep them killed off. Hunting parties from Biloxi, Gulfport, and other points find the shooting exceptionally good here, the bags of Wild Turkeys running from ten to twenty for a two or three day trip of several persons, with a few deer and even an occasional bear. With limited time, we could not penetrate deeply enough into the swamp to find such game, but my ornithological zeal was satisfied by the sight of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird so near extinction that I had never hoped to see a living specimen." (Julian D. Corrington, "The Winter Birds of the Biloxi, Mississippi Region." Auk, Vol. 39: October 1, 1922.)
We began our kayak of the area just after dawn on a fairly clear, unusually warm day. The forest was not too difficult to navigate; a gentle current allowed us to skim the honey-colored water of the channels at a rapid clip or sit quietly as we chose, watched all the while by numerous red-eared sliders warming themselves on logs. Flocks of wood ducks whizzed overhead and though the trees at the edge of our sight, their alarm calls mingling with the screams of hawks. We saw many woodpeckers, mainly the usual suspects -- red-headed, red-bellied, downy, and at least one hairy woodpecker; yellow-bellied sapsuckers and flickers; and finally a pair of pileateds, one of which gave me a bit of a start when it lit in a distant canopy, causing me to scramble to bring the kayak to a halt. Then I heard its tell-tale laughter, bringing a laugh from my brother as well.
I discovered that my camera batteries were dead, so I had to rely on my cell phone. Luckily, Brian's camera was in good working order.
We put in at a small unnamed lake that had overflowed into the surrounding bottomland forest. (Photo: Brian Carlisle.)
Brian was already well ahead by the time I clambered into my kayak and shoved off...
...and yet he still managed to come back around in time to snag a shot of me.
We alternately followed channels and kayaked through the woods, moving generally south- southwestward towards Little Lake.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
I was rather taken by the serene swamp forest. Maybe kayaking through flooded bottomland is still a bit of a novelty for me. (Photo: brian Carlisle.)
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
After some trial and error, we found ourselves on the south edge of Little Lake.
I pause beneath a largish cavity in a tupelo. Signs of woodpecker activity could be easily found throughout this forest, and we were drawn to several cavities, usually in tupelos. Photo: Brian Carlisle.
We kayaked from the south end of Little Lake, through the cypress-tupelo swamp forest of its northern half, and back into the flooded bottomland. We bore eastward, until with a little more trial and error (and some portaging) we found a wide, deep channel that eventually led us back to the small lake near Brian's truck. An older man passed us in his aluminum motorboat, probably heading for a favorite fishing hole.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
After we had loaded our kayaks back into the truck, we decided that the day was still young enough for more kayaking; so we decided to head back north to one of our favorite areas, the oxbow Hutson Lake. We put in there, and explored a "shadow" oxbow that connects to Hutson via a short channel, and takes in what Hutson may send her. Here Richard Ezell and I had spent hours exploring in the summer of 2014, an experience that left us both completely soaked, and which ruined my cell phone. A lone cormorant greeted us at Hutson, but few other birds made their presence known that late in the morning, and we saw little else besides more turtles.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
Photo: Brian Carlisle.
Conclusions: While we saw no suggestive scaling, and heard no kents or double-knocks, Brian and I have already found two other intriguing locations in the vicinity of Little Lake which we hope to explore in the coming months. While there seems less variety of tree species in this far southern sector of the Pascagoula River Swamp, the maturity of the bottomland and swamp forest, combined with the historical record, have made an impression on my imagination.
