Ivory-billed Woodpecker Mobile Search Team

Adventures on the road

Follow the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's mobile search team as they travel to sites in the historic range of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Visit www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory to see their latest photos and travel log entries.

Nathan Banfield in a tupelo swamp, Congaree National Park

Chris McCafferty

December 20, Congaree National Park, South Carolina

"The combined forest areas…along the Congaree, Wateree, and Santee drainages appear to provide an impressive southern bottomland forest ecosystem with the potential to harbor ivory-bills."
—Martjan Lammertink

January 29, Choctawhatchee River Basin, Florida

"…We had to deal with towels, shoes, and waders that were frozen solid."
—Utami Setiorini

Martjan Lammertink

February 15, Pearl River Basin, Louisiana

"Many of the trees still standing are dead, as they were killed by the falling oaks, hurricane winds, and salt water surge…In his study of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the 1930s, James Tanner described how ivory-bills were mostly feeding in trees with bark still tightly adhering, a state of decay present up to two to three years after the death of the tree. In the hurricane-damaged forests of the Pearl River area, most dead trees seem beyond the optimal decay stage for ivory-bills much sooner than that."
—Martjan Lammertink

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu