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He saves rare woodpecker
June 01, 2011By: Michael Abrams
Hosford, Fla
Strapped 44 feet up in a longleaf pine tree, Chuck Hess fishes with a home-brewed noose into a three inch hole in a tree, closes the noose, and carefully draws out by its neck a frail, fleshy, chirping red-cockaded woodpecker chick that was hatched only a few days ago. He adds it to its siblings in a well-used binocular case, and readies for the climb back to the flatwood understory in the Apalachicola National Forest.
“This one is seven days old,” says Hess, the little chick, eyes still forming, wings raw, nestling in the warmth of his open hand.
It’s a window of opportunity in the forest. The chicks at 7 to 10 days old can’t see and stretch up for feeding when a shadow comes across the hole. That’s not mom or dad. It’s Hess ready to capture, band them, and return them to the nest. He’s been doing this for 23 mating seasons, banding 10-15 birds a day.
He and others are trying to save a woodpecker species that has almost vanished along with the longleaf forest in the southeastern United States. This species is a key sign of a healthy longleaf forest.
It nests only in mature longleaf pines. Its genetic history tells a tale of survival. Its cavities in the long-lived longleaf pines are a legacy for other animals. They are used by secondary nesters such as redbellies, crested flycatchers, bluebirds, brown headed nuthatches, and even flying squirrels.
This unique forest’s longleaf pines and wildflowers tell their story in midst of the ‘other Florida’ - near state parks like Wakulla Springs, lakes like Lake Talquin and Lake Seminole, and the Apalachicola River. These areas attracts thousand of people every year who come to camp, fish, hike, swim, ride horseback, boat, and motorbike. The forest, itself, stretches across Florida’s Big Bend into Leon, Gadsden Liberty and Franklin Counties, touching on the metropolitan area of Tallahassee.
May brings colors of coreopsis, orchids, pitcher plants and an abundance of asters, with magnolias and bay trees abloom in the woods.
The ingenious bird, found only in the Southeastern United States, has learned to survive. For many feet below the holes, the bird works the tree so that sap runs out. When a snake climbs, its scales can become glued together, and it falls.
Florida has been blessed with an obligation.
Apalachicola National Forest in Florida’s Big Bend area has the largest remaining population of the red-cockaded woodpecker, some 500 groups. The bird is not migratory. Mom and pop tend the nests, and there are usually two or three hatchlings.
In August, people will come to Tallahassee asking for juvenile birds for their own forests. At that point, the birds are several months old.
“We come in the evening and catch them all the way into the night,” says Hess, who has been working with the woodpeckers for 20 years. The night they are caught, the birds are driven to needy forests where biologists put them into readied cavities, and release them the next day.
“If you’re on the list you’ll get birds this year,” says Hess, a wildlife biologist whom you might mistake for a cracker cowboy in his western hat, wrap-around shades, and U.S. Forest Service pickup truck.
That would be misleading. He blends tree climbing with some noted scholarship, and he has also trained many people in his field in banding the birds.
His observation of the bird’s major diet of tree ants attracted Dr. Walter Tschinkel, famed ant scientist at Florida State University. They have collaborated on a study that shows older trees have a wider variety of ants. Older trees are good for the birds.
The chicks, perhaps 20 or 30 a day, are banded in May, both legs coded by band color. Between October and December, Hess will be back in the trees, evening into night, capturing this year’s juveniles for a nightlong road trip to forests in and out of Florida. The trip must be quick. More than 36 hours in human hands, and the birds stress and then tend to die, he explains.
We are down a dusty dirt road on a May noon around 20 miles from Hosford, section 34 of the forest, where the gallberries flower, palmettos fruit, wiregrass sprouts up, and the chirp of the woodpecker is that lonely sound you hear. The woods have been burned not long ago, a prescribed burn that keeps the understory low and and helps the longleaf pines thrive. More burns in summer would help, says Hess, as 80,000 acres of the national forest habitat have been lost to turkey oaks and the like. Summer burns also promote herbaceous understory. That brings a wider variety of insects for the birds to feed on.
He brings down two chicks, each weighing about 24 grams. Wing measurement on the second bird is 18 millimeters. Colors of the bands tell which area the bird was from, and when it was banded.
The birds can’t be sexed this young, so Hess comes back in 30 days when the males have a red spot on their heads, and notes the band colors. When the birds are translocated, both male and female are taken.
Worries? Hurricanes, for one. South Carolina’s Francis Marion forest used to be one of the two top areas for these birds. Hurricane Hugo destroyed the habitat. Trees snapped, 70 percent of the birds were swept away. The saving grace is that the Apalachicola is large enough so that a hurricane couldn’t destroy everything. There is no way to prevent such a disaster.
One of the big success stories is DeSoto National Forest near Biloxi, Mississippi, which was down to five male birds in 1991. From 30 to 40 breeding groups now thrirve in that forest, which has reached a point where it will get no more birds. The population of Paisley Woods in the Ocala National Forest has soared from just five birds to more than 30 breeding pairs.
“We still have a lot of state lands where we are restoring small populations,” says Hess. “They had gotten too small to sustain themselves.”
The latest project could solve a major problem in the Apalachicola forest, which supports 100,000 acres of slash pines. “It’s the ecologicial equivalent of longleaf, once it’s in the right condition,” Hess says. Instead of clearcutting and planting longleaf, he things selective underplanting might work. He has experimental areas in the forest.
Why save this inconspicuous bird?
“This woodpecker is a management indicator for the longleaf pine tree. The longleaf pine system was the dominant ecosystem in the southeastern US,” he explains.
“We’ve almost destroyed it and this woodpecker tells you where its in good shape and tells you a lot about the health of the system. Yeah, you could get rid of any species you want. You have to remember there are a lot of reasons to keep species alive.”
“There’s the aesthetic. Then the religious which we call stewardship because that’s our responsibility. Then, there’s ‘just what’s right to do.’ It’s like a book, and you just don’t throw it away. This is the history of the genetics of that species, and you just lose all that information.”
