Excerpt from CHAPTER 3
from a talk with Ralph Costa, USFWS Red-Cockaded Recovery Coordinator

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are resourceful birds. For example, to deter their primary predator, rat snakes, RCWs drill resin wells around the entrances to their cavity nests. The wells leak resin, which coats the trunk to form a sticky shield against the snakes.

Because RCWs make their homes in fire-prone areas, though, I had doubts about this tactic. The cavity nests I’d seen were often 20 feet up the trunk. Sometimes higher, but also lower--as low as 6 feet. Coating a cavity tree with highly flammable resin in a fire-prone region didn’t seem like a bright idea.

“Picture the pre-Columbian longleaf pine forest,” explained Ralph Costa, Red-Cockaded Woodpecker Recovery Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “The trees were often 300 to 400 years old--huge, really tall. Because of frequent fires, the understory was essentially grass. De Soto [1540s] and Bartram [1770s] described those forests as prairies with trees. The bigger and taller the trees, the higher the RCW cavity nests and the farther the resin from the ground.” In extant old-growth longleaf forests such as the Wade Tract in Georgia “the cavities are 70, 80 feet up because they can be.” Before the old longleaf forests were cut, “it didn’t matter that there was sap on trees. The flashy fuel, the low intensity fires, the shorter flame heights--these probably weren’t an issue to the red-cockaded.”

Because tracts of longleaf habitat--like that of the Carolina Sandhills Refuge--are protected now, “someday the trees will be taller and the cavities higher than they are today. But until our pines get bigger, our fuels get lower, and our cavity trees increase in number,” he added, “the woodpeckers need our help. . . .

“RCWs are also an indicator species. If you have red-cockadeds, it’s a good indication that you have a healthy Southern pine forest. Some people argue that we’re investing all this time and these resources in single-species management. With RCWs, it’s easy to shoot holes in that argument. By preserving 200-acre patches of longleaf forest for the woodpeckers, we’re taking care of everything else that’s living out there.”