As one who has done some recent backcountry travel in Chihuahua & Durango,
the "former" haunts of the Ivory-billed, I must say that there is a LOT of
habitat out in those mountains that is very far from completely surveyed
for anything biological. I was also struck with how much good pine-oak
forest was left, even along paved highways! I expected to see total
devastation, but what I saw looked a lot less trashed than many back road
lands I've seen in Washington or in Oregon. If you want to see devastation,
our commercial "foresters" in the NW wrote the book. I think it is at least
vaguely possible that these birds may yet hide out in a remote sector of
the Sierra Madres. On the other hand, hungry people with guns are quite
common in that area -- a fact that may present as big a threat to any
potential survivors as habitat destruction.

Mark


>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

- Mark Egger
9521-49th Ave. NE
Seattle, WA 98115-2627

megger at home.com