WAVERLY, Va. (AP) - Flopping around on a towel on the floor of a pine forest, a tiny chick represented hope - if hope can be blind, pink and naked.
This object of optimism, no more than a blob with a beak, was a baby red-cockaded woodpecker, one of the rarest and most peculiar birds in Virginia.
Using climbing gear and an aluminum ladder that he stacked in three 10-foot sections, biologist Bryan Watts had reached the chick’s nest hole in an old-growth pine and extracted the bird with a snare-like tool.
Another biologist, Mike Wilson, put a series of leg bands on the 7-day-old chick. The scientists band the woodpeckers to identify individual birds and learn more about their habits in an effort to build the Virginia population.
“Hope for the future, that’s what you’ve got there,” Watts said.
There are just 13 pairs of these once-common woodpeckers in Virginia, all here in a Sussex County preserve about 55 miles southeast of Richmond.
The work of Watts, Wilson and others is part of an effort to bring back not just a little bird most people will never see but also to restore its majestic wild home - open, parklike pine savannas that once defined Eastern coastal regions but that, like the bird, have been devastated by human actions.
Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology, a research group, and Wilson, also with the center, banded five chicks from three nest trees on a sunny, blue day in May.
The red-cockaded woodpecker, a black-and-white, bluebird-size creature with bright white cheeks, once thrived from New Jersey to Florida to Texas.
After we cut most of its forests and put out fires that once kept the remaining forests open, the red-cockaded woodpecker began dying out. It was listed as an endangered species in 1970.
It has totally died out north of Virginia, and in Virginia it disappeared from most of its southeastern and Southside haunts. Now it survives only at the 3,200-acre Piney Grove Preserve.
The Nature Conservancy, an environmental group, began acquiring the land in 1998 to restore the bird and the forest. In 2000, there were just two breeding pairs and 16 woodpeckers overall.
After years of work including the periodic burning of forests to remove brush the birds don’t like, there are now the 13 pairs and 53 birds total.
That’s tremendous progress, scientists say. But the bird is isolated and in constant danger of going extinct in Virginia.
“All of our eggs are in one basket,” Wilson said. “If we did have a major storm rip through there and knock down a bunch of trees, we could really be hurt.”
The red-cockaded woodpecker resembles a couple of common backyard birds, but they don’t have the large, white cheek patches. The “cockade” is a tiny red spot, usually hidden, behind each eye of the male.
The bird is not an eye-catcher - it’s no eagle - but it exudes a strange charisma.
“I love talking about them,” Wilson said, “because there are so many quirky things about them.”
For example:
- They live in clans, or groups, consisting of a mated pair and two or three young helpers. The helpers bring spiders and other food to the chicks, help incubate eggs and defend the nest from intruders. Clan behavior is rare among birds.
- Most woodpeckers, including those in your neighborhood, seek shelter in holes they drill in dead trees in a few days. The red-cockaded woodpecker drills holes in live trees, which can take months and sometimes up to two years. Some nests last decades, serving generations of birds. So it’s devastating when a nest tree is lost.
- Because their tree holes, or cavities, are so valuable, the birds go to great lengths to defend them. For example, they are the first birds in the forest to go into their holes in the evening, to keep other birds from moving in and taking over. And they are the last birds to leave their holes in the morning, to keep flying squirrels, which are nocturnal and knocking off for the night, from claiming the holes. “They go to bed early and sleep in late, but there’s a reason behind it,” Wilson said.
When European settlers arrived centuries ago, they found a vast forest of towering old pines stretching from the Mid-Atlantic through the Deep South to Texas. Wildfires kept those forests open.
Cutting the forests and putting out fires, among other things, nearly wiped out the pine savannas. As those savannas disappeared, 99 percent of the red-cockaded woodpeckers, which had evolved with the savannas and were common in them, died out, too.
On a gorgeous, 80-degree day in early April, about two dozen people burned part of Piney Grove to help restore a savanna. The fire, called a controlled burn, cleared out small sweetgums and other brush that had grown up between towering loblolly pines.
After carefully checking conditions such as wind and humidity, workers created lines of fire on the ground by walking and dripping a flaming mixture of kerosene and gasoline from an old-school device called a flame torch.
Others followed to spray water along one side of the burn line, enticing the fire to go the right direction.
At times, a few inches of flame along the ground would spread into a patch of brush and roar up several feet high, turning blue-gray smoke into brown billows that dimmed the sun like a cloud.
At one point, the winds picked up and swirled. The fire started misbehaving, jumping into a part of the woods that wasn’t supposed to be burned that day.
As the fire kept trying to exert its independence, burn workers, communicating by walkie-talkies, moved quickly to trouble spots. With hoes and other tools, they forced the fire to cooperate.
The main effect was that a patch of forest that was going to be burned soon got its flame treatment early.
The Nature Conservancy’s Sam Lindblom, who was in the charge of the burn, said many of the workers - from state and federal agencies and other places - were there for training. They got it, he said.
About 1 million acres of pine savanna used to grace southeastern Virginia, said Bobby Clontz, who manages the Piney Grove Preserve. Less than 1 percent remains.
Once you see a pine savanna, you can understand why people want to save it.
At Piney Grove, big, old-growth pines looked down on a forest floor covered with ferns, blueberries, broom-straw grasses, wild magnolias beginning to bloom and wild azaleas in bloom. You could hear the “jeek!” of adult woodpeckers over the wind in the pines. The forest also harbors birds including summer tanagers, bobwhite quail and wild turkeys.
To truly save the savanna, you need to save the red-cockaded woodpecker, Watts said. The forest can look right and smell right, he said. “But without them here, it’s not complete.”
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Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, https://www.timesdispatch.com
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