I have to throw my hat in the ring and at least comment on this. Someone named Daniel Rainsong says he has photos of an Ivory-billed woodpecker in the Sabine River Basin in East Texas taken on December 29, 2009. Okay. Bring it on.
Here’s the beginning of a blog post written by Matt Mendenhall, associate editor at Birder’s World that does a great job of summarizing what’s known about this claim so far.
Woodpecker experts haven’t seen supposed Ivory-bill photos
At the risk of giving credibility to a possible hoax, here’s what we know about the latest report of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting.
If Daniel Rainsong has photos of a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker, as this press release claims, he has not yet shown them to two leading Ivory-bill experts.
Van Remsen, curator of birds at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Science and an adjunct professor of biological sciences at LSU, told me today that Rainsong visited him in Baton Rouge, “but he would not show me his photographic evidence. He said he had to develop them.”
The comment suggested that Rainsong used a film camera. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Remsen added. “I won’t comment until I see the evidence.” (click here to read the entire post . . .)
There is no one who would be more thrilled than I if this turned out to be true. For several years it was all-ivory-bill, all the time because my husband Tim Gallagher was one of the first to rediscover the species in Arkansas. Tim subsequently wrote about his rediscovery and Cornell’s efforts in his book The Grail Bird. I also wrote about the rediscovery in Audubon Magazine.
Not falconry but I wrote this little piece for a website I contribute to and I thought some might find it interesting and even useful. Here’s the beginning:
“When I travel I always carry a little black moleskin journal that flips open like a reporter’s notebook. I also buy a new pen before a journey that I slip through the elasticized band that encircles the journal. This is my traveling kit – one in which I make notes in longhand and draw sketches to illustrate what I’m seeing. I imagine what I record is like a kindergarten version of what Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson – two great 19th century diarists – might have recorded.
Often, when I read through my notebook after a trip, I’m struck by how things going on in the outside world tend to creep into my observations; how my remarks are guided by events that may or may not be in the front of my brain at the time; how I can completely miss the story in front of me in favor of a description of something like a mountain ash tree.” (click here to read more . . .)
Here’s a snippet from one of my pages, complete with cartoon drawing:
I stumbled across this long post about golden eagles Aquila chrysaetos complete with a number of videos. This blog The Texas Cichlid Massacre is pretty interesting and covers topics as varied as paleontology, fish, wildlife, and crytozoology. Please visit his blog to read the golden eagle post. If anyone is hankering for a dose of using golden eagles to hunt in Mongolia, below is one of the youtube videos from his blog:
It was nice to see this little review this morning as part of a round-up of bird books in the Montreal Gazette:
“Speaking of the vanishing American West and its icons, I was thrilled to see Rachel Dickinson’s Falconer on the Edge (Houghton Mifflin, $25) about Steve Chindgren, a pioneer, a Western mountain man and, most of all, a hardcore falconer.
I once attended a falconry conference in Utah and I will never forget my adventure of running along with Steve full-tilt on frozen mud in a marsh as he chased after his beloved hunting peregrine. He is eccentric, fanatical, obsessive and truly dedicated to the sport of falconry. Not for the faint of heart, though. (to read more click here . . .)
A seven-year-old Whooping Crane — the only successful breeding female from the eastern migratory population — was shot and killed in western Indiana, near the town of Cayuga in central Vermillion County, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Crane Foundation said today.
The crane, known as 17-02, and her mate, 11-02, hatched two chicks in summer 2006 and one in summer 2009 at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. One of the 2006 birds survived. The parents have been the only adults in the eastern population to raise a chick and lead it to wintering grounds in Florida.
In late November, cranes 17-02 and 11-02 had stopped at a marsh in Indiana, a place they typically stop at on their southbound migration. Eva Szyszkoski, tracking field manager for the International Crane Foundation, observed the pair on November 28 during an aerial survey. On her return flight on Tuesday, December 1, 17-02 was missing. Ground tracker Jess Thompson raced to the area and found the bird dead near a ravine, not far from a rural county road. (click here to read more . . .)
The following is the beginning of a piece by Cat Urbigkit that showed up on Stephen Bodio’s Querencia blog yesterday:
Making headlines across the West of late is a two-page preliminary report issued by a Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist noting that barbed wire fences pose a collision hazard to Greater Sage Grouse. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to meet its court-ordered February deadline to determine if sage grouse should be granted Endangered Species Act protections, so the report will come into play there. Those who oppose livestock grazing on public lands are also latching onto the report as another reason to rid the western range of its agricultural industry, and its associated fences.
But everyone might be reading more into the report than it merits. WG&F biologist Tom Christiansen noted it all began when two separate falconers provided incidental reports that grouse had been injured or killed on the top wire of certain fences located near important grouse areas. The area is just to the southeast of where we ranch, in the border area of Sublette and Sweetwater counties. This area is believed to have one of the largest concentrations of sage grouse on the planet. It’s falconer Steve Chindgren’s stomping grounds (the falconer who is the subject of Rachel Dickinson’s Falconer on the Edge).
According to Christiansen’s report, “One of these falconers subsequently began marking such fences with aluminum beverage cans in a volunteer effort to reduce these mortalities.” (Click here to read the rest of the post . . .)
If you are not familiar with this blog, I urge you to check it out. Several people post regularly including Cat Urbigkit, Matt Mullenix, and Steve Bodio and the topics range from falconry to coursing dogs to natural history.
In September I took a trip to Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. And although I was really looking forward to seeing where the St. Lawrence River leaves the confines of its banks and flows into the ocean, one of the biggest draws for me was the night train from Montreal to Gaspe. Trains have always held a fascination for me, drawing on some part deep inside that really wants to live in the 19th century (although I’m not so much of a sentimentalist that I don’t know that 19th century train travel also involved lots of soot and hard seats). (click here to read the rest of the piece . . .)
Paul Nicklen, a National Geographic photographer, tells of his surprising encounters with a female leopard seal in Antarctica over the course of four days.
Here’s what passes for news in Cary, North Carolina:
“CARY — Blanchard, a 22-week-old pet rooster, was killed while strutting in his owners’ yard Saturday morning by a hawk that should have been hunting for rabbits.
Ann Richard and her husband, Dieter Griffis, got the startling news when the hawk’s owner paid a visit to their Green Level Church Road home to apologize. The owner told the couple, who were too distraught to catch his name, that he had been hunting with his hawk on a farm across the street.
The hawk, which was released to hunt rabbits during an extended North Carolina falconry season, flew to the couple’s property and mauled Blanchard, a light Brahma chicken, a breed originally imported from India and named for its white base coloring.”
To continue reading and see how the plot thickens, click here.
I went out flying with Tim yesterday morning but there were no ducks to be found on the little pond. MacDuff flew over the pond, took a quick look, then headed for a flock of pigeons that were coming off a nearby horse farm. He chased the pigeons then took some passes at a ball of starlings that erupted from a clump of trees. Finally he came back over the pond, hoping his fortunes had changed. No such luck.
A seven-year-old Whooping Crane — the only successful breeding female from the eastern migratory population — was shot and killed in western Indiana, near the town of Cayuga in central Vermillion County, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Crane Foundation said today.
