The red-cockaded woodpecker, a highly social little bird that lives in well-structured family groups, is one of Georgia’s rarest birds — first declared endangered in 1968.
Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, major recovery efforts to help the species survive and increase in numbers were established in Georgia and across the Southeast. Today, an estimated 6,000 family groups, or “clans,” of red-cockaded woodpeckers (about 15,000 birds) live from Florida to Virginia and west to eastern Texas.
The number, though, is less than 1 percent of the woodpecker’s original population — some 1.5 million birds — that thrived in the Southeast’s open, mature pine forests at the time of European settlement.
The drastic loss of such forests over the past 200 years has been the primary cause of the species’ decline.
Georgia now has about 3,000 of the birds concentrated in wildlife refuges, the Okefenokee Swamp, extensive pine forests on military bases like Fort Stewart and Fort Benning, and on private quail-hunting plantations around Thomasville.
Last week, I went to check on one of the state’s largest red-cockaded woodpecker populations at the 35,000-acre Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge in central Georgia, some 70 miles south of Atlanta. A 2.9-mile loop trail, appropriately named the RCW Trail, leads to an active colony of the woodpeckers, which are nesting now.
There, I sat on a bench beneath soaring pines to catch glimpses of the birds as they flitted among the trees in which they have drilled their distinctive cavities some 30-50 feet above the ground.
The bird, about the size of a cardinal, is the only woodpecker in the U.S. that excavates cavities in living pines. Around each cavity, it also pecks numerous small “resin wells” that exude copious pine sap, which deters predators, especially snakes.
The black-and-white red-cockaded woodpecker is so-named because males have a small tuft of red feathers on their head. More information: fws.gov/charleston/pdf/RCW/redcockadedwp_brochure.pdf.
In the sky: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon will be new Friday. The only visible planets right now are Mars and Saturn, which rise in the east around dusk; and Jupiter, high in the south at dusk.