Dear Don,

On what basis? Ivory Billed were found on a highly pressured piece of real estate way out in the ocean, otherwise known as Cuba, after all the experts called them "goners". There is a whole lot more habitat on the continental land mass, and more than likely much more suitable habitat remaining intact. Island ecologies are usually much more susceptible to degradation by human pressure. If they survived in Cuba till fairly recently, is not fair to assert that there is a greater chance of them surviving on a continuous continental land mass?

True, they may be gone again, but I'll ask the question on more time. Does anyone know if a team has sought either species by reading biomass satellite data to find old growth areas, matched to topography, with human disturbance data, and sought the remaining pockets out for possible survivors?

It seems to make sense to me. Now, I don't proclaim to be an expert. I'm just trying to use some common sense. I know, common sense commonly leads to foolish errors. I am hoping some of the more enlightened will fill me in. Is this an old topic on Tweets?

Kai Schraml
thekaiser at earthlink.net


-----Original Message-----
From: Don Baccus [SMTP:dhogaza at pacifier.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 1999 8:09 PM
To: thekaiser at earthlink.net; 'Chris Thompson'
Cc: 'tweeters at u.washington.edu'
Subject: RE: Oaxaca...Imperial Woodpeckers -Reply

At 09:51 AM 1/14/99 -0800, Kai Schraml wrote:

>Thanks a bunch for the note. Let me ask you something else. Have any of
the recent teams for the Ivory Billed, Imperial, Bachman's, etc... taken
advantage of the very highly sophisticated GPS guided mapping technologies
to target very specific habitat that may have been missed by the "Well, we
last saw them around here" methods?

In regard to large woodpeckers, I'll have to point out that they seem to
require
large tracts of habitat. Missing a square mile of habitat based on the "we
last saw
them around here" model might be possible, the large contiguous area or
separate patches
with substantial connectivity between them seems very small.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza at pacifier.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net