ML147682
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Subject 1: (Interview). Subtitle: Remsen, J. V., Jr. Timecode In: 00:05:00. Timecode out: 00:10:24. Notes: Ivory-billed woodpecker discussion. Subject 2: (Interview). Subtitle: Numerous biologists. Timecode In: 00:10:37. Timecode out: Unknown. Notes: Expedition meeting with comments from Remsen, J. V., Jr., Mark Emmert, Alan Wormington, David Luneau, Rick Knight, Alison Styring, Martjan Lammertink and Peter McBride. Equipment Notes: Decoded MS stereo. NPR/NGS RADIO EXPEDITIONS Show: Woodpeckers Log of DAT #: 1 Engineer: Flawn Williams Date: January 15, 2002 Radex Woodpeckers Log First Trip Jan 15-17 2002 Tape 1 0:01 Jan 15, 2002, Baton Rouge Louisiana. MS pair, MKH 50 in the mid, MKH 30 on the side. Alternate miking: DPA omni condensers, to AB stereo. 50-30 combo needs MS decoding in post-production 0:58 lots of conversations, mingling. Clearest conversation is with Nancy Higginbotham and Van Remsen. Talk about launching etc. 3:17 Van Remsen starts talking, room goes silent. Group heads around the corner to talk about Ivorybills and look at specimens. 5:02 Van Remsen: First of all, I'm not an expert on Ivorybill woodpeckers. There's no expert on Ivorybill woodpeckers. We're all feeding off of the one monograph that was written about Ivorybill woodpeckers in the 1940's by James Tanner¿ Continues talking about the woodpeckers, describes the specimens, both ivorybills and pileated, collected in Franklin Parish in 1899. 6:35 "The reason the Ivorybill woodpecker went extinct, or we hope not totally extinct, is that it was specialized on a stage of forest, old growth, that had lots of old mature dying trees in the swamps, the bottomlands, the southeastern United States. It was found from east Texas to Oklahoma, north along the Mississippi to southern Illinois, and north along the coast to North Carolina. It was a true denizen of our southeastern swampy bottomland forests. It was restricted to those habitats. The reason that it went extinct was that those woods were cut over once, twice, three times. And the large trees that had lots of dead wood in them plus the old maturing forest just wasn't there anymore. Younger forest doesn't have as high a percentage of dead wood in it. The study that Tanner did found what we think is the key ingredient to the mystery of why Ivorybill woodpeckers went extinct. In contrast to our common pileated woodpecker which just digs in any old dead wood, whether it's three years, four years, ten years old, and does a lot of other things, Ivorybill woodpeckers, the majority of their time was spent doing one and only one thing. And that is scaling bark off of trees that were say one, two, three years dead. They weren't dead to the point that all the bark had fallen off, but they were still dead and the bark was still on. There was a suite of beetle larvae, that Tanner found, that ate the sapwood between the bark and the dead wood. And those beetle larvae would capitalize on dead trees. The bark protected the beetle larvae from woodpeckers in general. The pileated does some bark-scaling and can get at some of those goodies. But my feeling about Ivorybill woodpeckers, the reason they're so big and so powerful and look at the bill compared to the pileated woodpecker. That's a nearly 100% difference in bill length even though the body length's not that different. This bird was built to efficiently whack off that dead bark, scale off that bark, and get at these large juicy grubs that were immune to predation from almost anything else. In so specializing, the Ivorybill woodpecker had to cover a lot of ground. The territory size was, Tanner found in Tensaw National Wildlife refuge that the territory size was 3 miles, 4 miles, 5 miles, 6 miles, ten miles square. So they needed a lot of area to have enough to have of those stages of dead trees to provide their... (Notes truncated)
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Sennheiser MKH 30; Sennheiser MKH 50
- Accessories
Archival information
- Cataloged
- 21 Jan 2010 - David McCartt
- Digitized
- 21 Jan 2010 - David McCartt
- Edited
- 21 Jan 2010 - David McCartt