If this report that they "went camping" during that time frame is true - they could have been setting up a spot for him to go. I really think this search in the reserve is utterly pointless.
I'll tell you what I think, from my years of working at a LE academy, a firefighter academy and a wilderness academy.
This is their chance to practice - for real! These people go out for 2-3 days a week, using their scuba gear, their FLIR cameras, their GPR and much less. They really look forward to a full scale event. It keeps coordinating agencies in touch and finely tuned. I've watched that search for several days now, and you can see it came in phases (and when the FBI showed up, first they went out and made notes about what they needed - and voilà, all those resources appeared - it is a wonderful training exercise if nothing else, but this one has a purpose - exactly what such expert scuba people and radar people like to do).
When it's fire season here, even the tiniest fire gets major treatment - for practice. Everyone does exactly what they drilled to do and there are people (often someone like me) along for the ride, taking video and taking notes. Then there's a day (or more if it's a big incident) of debriefing and critiquing.
Everyone from aviation control to local FF's and LE get their instructions and all are coordinated by the incident commander and the sub-commander.
While someone might suspect BL is there, it doesn't really matter at this point - they're practicing for a What-If scenario if nothing else. What if someone ran into that swamp after blatantly killing someone in full view of cameras and the public? What could they do? What would they do?
Look for cameras to be placed at strategic places in that swamp in future, if authorities can afford it. Which is always the big question. But I do think that most of these people would have been doing some training anyway - this puts their training and the resources used to set that up to better use. For example, at Fire Academy, for a long time we bought entire houses, the trainees built a foundation, house was trucked in - and then burned down. That was expensive. They created a "fire scenario building" that is permanent (but still has a typical California roof, which gets burned each year). They built a fake high rise building (etc). But nothing is as good as getting to fire season and going out on real calls...