ivory-billed woodpecker news

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.

the art of the travel journal

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: