Story by Brian Keyes
Graphics by Hailey Haymond
Until recently, the conservation effort around the red-cockaded woodpecker was one of the biggest success stories of the Endangered Species Act.
Once abundant, with a population well over a million strong before European colonization, the red-cockaded woodpecker’s territory stretched as far north as New Jersey, down to Florida, and west to Texas. Now there are fewer than 20,000 total birds, with much of their historic habitat destroyed from logging, development and poor forestry practices.
The total number of birds actually marks an improvement since the species was listed under the Endangered Species Act, and though they still needed constant management from conservationists, there were reasons to be optimistic that human intervention could bring back a species once pushed to the brink.
But the winds of fortune are literally shifting.
The red-cockaded woodpeckers are facing an increasingly-serious threat that might jeopardize the past 50 years of conservation — a changing climate that will brings increasingly frequent and powerful storms to bear on the coastal populations, combined with a government moving to rollback protections for the birds.
“There’s probably been more significant damage to the woodpecker populations in the last three years than in the previous 50,” Jeffrey Walters, a conservation biologist and professor at Virginia Tech, said. “There was one big storm in 1989 that did a lot of damage we had, but there’s been multiple, major impacts in the last few years.”
Red-cockaded woodpeckers are uniquely vulnerable to drastic changes in their habitat — they make their homes by pecking out cavities in living, old-growth pine trees, and the process to make new ones can take years, making it difficult to move to a new forest. The birds’ dependence on old-growth forests limit territory even further as humans continue to destroy potential territory with ever-growing development.
Conservation for the birds revolves around maintaining those pine forests, as well as building artificial cavities to install in suitable trees.
Those pine forests face more subtle threats than just the destructive effect of hurricanes though. Climate change is causing longer rainy and dry seasons, which makes it more difficult to effectively manage these old growth forests.
“When it’s super wet for a long time you can’t burn, it’s just too wet,” said Jeffrey Marcus, a longleaf pine tree scientist with the Nature Conservancy based in the Sandhills of North Carolina. “And when it’s super dry and droughty, you can’t burn because it’s really dangerous, you can kill trees and can put houses at risk, there’s more wildfires.”
The birds’ hyper-specificity within their habitat means if a large storm knocked over all their cavity trees, or if the pine trees aren’t replaced because of growing hardwoods and a lack of fire to burn them out, the population would be decimated.
And most of the large, managed populations of red-cockaded woodpeckers (RCW) are located near the southeastern or gulf coast of the United States — firmly in the possible path for Hurricanes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service currently lists 63 out of 124 accounted for populations as vulnerable to catastrophic impacts of hurricanes, with 56 of those populations having low or very ability to withstand environmental or demographic changes.
Already, some RCW populations have suffered damage. Beatriz Pace-Aldana, a conservationist with the Nature Conservancy at the Disney Wilderness Preserve in central Florida, said that Hurricane Irma in 2017 caused minor damage to her preserve, but did eventually lead to the loss of three birds out of 10 total mating pairs.
A year later, Hurricane Michael caused devastating damage to the RCW population in the Apalachicola National Forest, causing damage to over a hundred thousand acres of forest and snapping nearly 1,500 trees with bird cavities in them. That same year, Hurricane Florence caused damage to the RCW population in Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., snapping 150 cavity trees on the military base.
“That’s a lot of cavities to have to replace,” Walters said. “So if managers can keep up with it, it’s not as big a problem. But you have to wonder, if this happens once in 50 years, you can mount a response, and get people from all over, go to that place and help them make cavities. But if it’s happening everywhere, frequently, eventually it’s going to be tough to keep up with it.”
Conservationists say that the problems the birds are facing are compounded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to downlist the birds from endangered to threatened. The proposal, which hasn’t been finalized yet, was part of a trend from the service under the Trump administration to remove protections for species covered under the Endangered Species Act.
Critics of the proposal say that the Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t following the best science available to make decisions around the conservation of RCWs, has been using a quota to identify endangered species to de- or downlist and hasn’t fully taken into account the effects of climate change.
“With the red-cockaded woodpecker, the Service, in its proposed down listing, chose to consider the foreseeable future as only 25 years in the future,” Ramona McGee, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), said. “The pine trees that red-cockaded woodpecker live in are typically 60 years old, they are decades old. This 25-year time horizon for the foreseeable future, just does not fit with the biology of the species.”
The FWS is required to consider habitat destruction and the impact of any decision in the “foreseeable future” before finalizing anything. Given that the full extent of how hurricanes and other storms may strengthen over the next several decades, McGee said that the timeframe the FWS had chosen was too short-sighted for the proposal to be properly considered.
The proposed downlisting could also mean the loss of a significant portion of funding for RCW conservation. Right now, most of the populations of RCWs are small, segregated and not self-sustaining without human intervention. A loss in funding to state wildlife agencies or military bases — which have a long history of assisting in RCW conservation — may lead those groups to simply stop conservation around the birds entirely.
Currently, the FWS has said it plans to issue a rule under section 4(D) of the Endangered Species Act to stop any otherwise lawful action that would result in harming the RCW population by destroying their cavity trees. The Service also said the rule would ban harming or harassing any birds during their breeding season and ban the use of insecticides and herbicides on nearby pine trees.
But in submitted comments on the proposed downlisting, the SELC said the proposed rule isn’t specific enough — groups would only be required to have some sort of management plan in place, regardless of how specific it was or what the projected benefits were. The SELC contends that the rule would remove uniform federal oversight, leaving conservation to a patchwork of agencies without the same level of expertise as the FWS, and allow the birds to be harmed on military land, on which a third of all known clusters (the family units the birds live in) exist.
In its proposal and in an email from its spokesperson, the FWS stated that the 2003 Red-cockaded Woodpecker Recovery Plan, an important document for conservationists to plan their efforts around for the past two decades, is for guidance only, and not a regulatory document.
In the recovery plan, several groups of RCWs are designated as “recovery populations” which would need to have a certain number of birds before the species should be considered downlisted from endangered to threatened. The proposal acknowledges that only 15 of 20 those populations meet the plans’s criteria and that 40 percent of the accounted for number of populations are in places where the birds may be in danger of local extinction, a fact which has caused frustration from conservationists.
“I think when we look to that (recovery plan), which is really kind of the, in my mind, really based on the best available science, a lot needs to be done with these smaller populations,” Jason Totoiu, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity said. “… we’re not going to see the species recover, in the truest sense, without those small populations making significant improvements as well.”
In response, the FWS contended that the 15 populations that do meet criteria for downlisting are showing either stable or showing growing numbers, and that the success of those groups is what prompted the proposal to move the birds off the endangered species list.
Both McGee and Pace-Aldana noted said that they believed most groups currently engaged in RCW conservation would continue to do so, regardless of the birds’ legal status. But they were troubled by the process through which Fish and Wildlife seemed to come to the decision.
Along with not meeting all its targets for downlisting in the recovery plan, McGee said that the FWS did not complete a thorough species status review using the best available science, something they are required to do by law before making any decision.
In an email, the spokesperson from the FWS said in response that the Service considered its proposed downlisting rule for the RCWs as taking the place of the species status review and that “this rule is based on the best available scientific information which is found in the species status assessment.”
Conservationists’ concern is that, when the storms threatening the coastal RCW populations decades from now increase in frequency and intensity, there may not be the necessary protections and resources in place to ensure the continued safety of the species. Populations along the Atlantic Coasts will be facing more frequent and dangerous storms, something not every conservation group is ready for. Devastating storms like the one that hit the Apalachicola National Forest will likely become more frequent, and its possible some populations of RCWs will face multiple devastating storms in the same season, which would quickly exhaust the limited resources conservation groups work with.
“I think the one thing that does need to change is that there is an emergency strategy that they’re ready for,” Walters said. “So every place in the coastal populations should have a plan.”
That preparedness, and the fate of the red-cockaded woodpecker as a whole, will hinge on there being enough resources and a strong enough conservation effort to weather the coming storms.
Fortunes may have changed though. Recently, the Biden administration signaled its support for broader conservation efforts by signing an executive order putting climate change at the forefront of policy making decisions, as well as announcing a review of the Trump administration rollbacks of the Endangered Species Act. It’s a step McGee said she hopes will trickle down to federal agencies like FWS and cause them to change their thinking.
“As for getting the agencies to actually consider climate change impacts in relation to red-cockaded woodpeckers, that’s up to all of us right now,” McGee said. “This proposal to downlist the red-cockaded woodpeckers is not final. So there are still opportunities to try and tell the Fish and Wildlife Service why this matters, to put that climate science in front of the agency, and encourage it to make a scientifically informed decision incorporating climate science for the red-cockaded woodpeckers’s future.”
