After observing the senseless shooting of raptors at Hawk Mountain in 1932, Pough sought a way to put an end to the slaughter and found the answer after speaking about this issue at a joint meeting of the Audubon and Linnaean societies in New York.
[2] After taking note of Pough's role in turning Hawk Mountain into a sanctuary, the National Audubon Society hired him in 1936 in a position designated for protecting persecuted species.
On the basis of researching the history of the region in terms of human activities (such as cotton farming) and ecological events (such as a severe drought that caused a large die-off of trees in the 1920s), Pough wrote a report, "Present Condition of the Tensas River Forests of Madison Parish, Louisiana, and the Status of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in This Area as of January, 1944," to the Executive Director of the National Audubon Society that challenged assertions by James Tanner[3] that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker requires old-growth forest and that the Singer Tract consisted of such habitat.
Pough's study is consistent with reports of dozens of sightings of this elusive species between 2004 and 2008 (many decades after the last old-growth swamp forests had been logged) during searches that took place in Arkansas,[4] Florida,[5] and Louisiana.
[6] The Ivory-billed Woodpecker disappeared from the Singer Tract as it was being logged, but history might have been different if this habitat destruction had not occurred before Pough blossomed into "the foremost land preservationist of his time.