IvorybilledWoodpecker_FoodintheWoods_Shackelford_Cliff_NacodochesTX_29July2021_Reel4063.mp3

Cliff Shackelford [00:00:00] The ivory-bill was apparently fairly approachable, easy to detect when someone in the woods would hear the toy trumpet sound, which was the call of the ivory-bill.

Cliff Shackelford [00:00:12] They could go over there and collect it and get, you know, enough meat to feed a family of four. I mean, it was, in some cases, larger than a duck. So you could get a lot of meat off an ivory-billed. And so you'll read about that.

Cliff Shackelford [00:00:27] And people tried to eat pileateds, but they, there was a big distaste for the meat of pileated. That's because if you look at what the primary food is for those two different woodpeckers, pileateds didn't taste good because a big part of their diet were ants.

Cliff Shackelford [00:00:44] And so they had an acid taste because they're eating the formic acid of these Camponotus ants and several other genera of ants. So that probably made their meat taste a little acidic and not very flavorful.

Cliff Shackelford [00:01:00] Now, ivory-bills ate, you know, a lot of, of larval-stage beetles, very tasty and not acidic at all. And so their, their meat probably tasted really good.

Cliff Shackelford [00:01:12] And so you can read about that, where old-timers would know not to try to collect that pileated and put it on the table for dinner tonight because noone's going to eat it. It didn't taste good at all. You couldn't put enough spice to get rid of that, that ant acid, formic acid taste.

Cliff Shackelford [00:01:30] But if they saw an ivory-billed, they knew that tasted good.

Cliff Shackelford [00:01:33] And so that's based on experience. And so that, that means that people looking for food in the woods during times of poverty, they knew what to eat, and what not to eat. And they knew what to try to strive for and what to avoid.

Cliff Shackelford [00:01:49] Well, you know, we, we've had to, Parks and Wildlife has really had to figure out how to maintain the number one game species in our state, which is white-tailed deer, that in a lot of places were extirpated because people were collecting them any day and every day of the year for food. And so we quickly realized that wasn't going to work. It's not sustainable to do that.

Cliff Shackelford [00:02:15] So that's why we have seasons and bag limits. So the season is when is it best that you can collect something, and the bag limit is how many can you take where you won't make an impact.

Cliff Shackelford [00:02:26] But that never happened for the ivory-billed. None of those laws and regulations were in effect, and noone was even paying attention to people that were, you know, taking their toll on the last remaining ones by collecting them for museums, for private collections, or collecting them to eat for dinner.

Cliff Shackelford [00:02:46] And so it, unfortunately, took a while for conservation to come around and figure these things out. And that's what we have today. And it works.

Cliff Shackelford [00:02:55] We, we have a lot of species that are, you know, like white-tailed deer that are thriving and actually in some places overabundant, because we have figured out that you can harvest them, but you have to do it at certain times of the year, in certain numbers and it doesn't impact the species.

Cliff Shackelford [00:03:13] But unfortunately for ivory-billed, that technology had not come around, that knowledge had not come around, until it's too late.