Endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers are the focus of an ongoing restoration project for the U.S. Forest Service on the Sam Houston. Foresters hope that relocation efforts will lead to population growth. Photo © Greg W. Lasley/KAC Productions.
The evening quiet of the Sam Houston National Forest is broken only by the muffled conversation of three men on a deserted road. They have parked their vehicles alongside an open area where much of the underbrush has been removed. A light breeze stirs the branches of the surrounding pine trees occasionally, bringing a little relief from the humidity.
The men remove spotting scopes, long-handled nets and tree-climbing gear from their trucks, joking with each other about who is going to make the hike across the clearing to the other side. The newest member of the group, Adam Moore, says he’ll take the assignment; he’s the intern.
The other two men—Shawn Jones, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife technician, and Felix Quesada, a wildlife biologist—are getting ready to survey and band red-cockaded woodpeckers. The woodpecker is on the endangered species list, but the Sam Houston, located in southeast Texas, has a relatively large population: an estimated 157 pairs. A few years ago, Forest Service workers here were sending birds to other national forests—some with as few as twenty-five pairs—to help repopulate their dwindling numbers.
Because the woodpeckers usually won’t travel more than five miles from their nesting site on their own, this Forest Service team has been capturing the birds and transporting them to new tree cavities in another section of the forest to help increase the population.
But the birds are elusive and not easily identified.
“I get people calling in saying they have red-cockaded woodpeckers at their feeder,” says Dawn Carrie, district biologist with the Forest Service. “The first thing I ask is if the birds have any red on them. If they answer yes I know it won’t be a red-cockaded because you almost never see that red unless you have the bird in the hand.”
The red-cockaded woodpecker is about five inches tall, slightly smaller than a cardinal, with a mottled black-and-white back. The males have a tiny red spot above and behind the eye. This small bird is the only wood-pecker in North America that makes its cavity in a live pine tree—other woodpeckers nest only in dead trees.
“They nest in live trees that have bark and [they] are really vulnerable to several natural enemies, including the red-bellied woodpeckers, southern flying squirrels and rat snakes. Rat snakes climb up the trees,” continues Carrie. “So [the woodpeckers] have evolved a neat behavior. They will peck resin wells in the bark all around their hole on all sides of the tree, and this makes sap run down the tree. They work these [wells] constantly. You end up with a tree that looks like a candlestick with sap running down. The sap makes the tree too slippery for the snake to handle.”
Loud chirping announces birds coming in to roost. Moore, Jones and Quesada maneuver around under the trees, using the spotting scopes to get a better view of where the birds’ nests are located. To capture the birds, they know that they can’t come right up in front of the cavity; instead they ease up the sides of the tree.
“If the bird is looking out and the net is dangling in front of him or her, they will fly out and then you have to find another tree with a bird in it,” Jones says. Either Jones or Moore will step out from the side of the tree with the net ready and place it over the cavity opening, while Quesada, the spotter, instructs the netter to raise or lower the net.
“If we’re lucky, they fly out into the net. Usually they don’t do that and we have to put ladders on the tree and climb up to the cavity and capture them,” Jones says. After they capture the birds, the team moves the birds to another area, bands them and places them in new cavities on recipient trees. They put a male bird in one tree and a female in another, then staple a piece of hardware cloth with a rope tied to it over each hole. “The next morning we go out there, pull the cloths off, the birds fly out, meet each other and supposedly fall in love.”
Last night, the men were in the forest well after dark, hardhat headlamps illuminating their work. A car coming down the deserted forest road slowed when the driver saw the lights moving through the trees. Finally, the driver stopped to see if there were deer poachers at work in the woods.
As the car slowly moved toward the men, Jones yelled out “Forest Service.” The car moved in even closer and Jones called out again.
“What are you doing in there?” the driver asked.
“Just working, sir,” replied Jones.
Working to keep one species from extinction.