Concern grows for future of red-cockaded woodpeckers
Readers in Montgomery County are concerned about Texas Senate Bill 1964, filed at the behest of Texas A&M University to allow construction of educational and research facilities in W. G. Jones State Forest, home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.
The proposed legislation would encompass the southern boundary of the forest to include 178-acres, the equivalent of 135 football fields.
I share people’s concern for the little woodpecker that is no bigger than a cardinal and with black and white barring on the back, a clean white cheek and a wisp of red feathers on the side of the male’s head resembling a tiny ribbon or cockade.
I also share people’s love of the lush 1,725-acre remnant of Southern pine forest that once blanketed Maryland to Houston.
Diminution of that vast forest began with European settlement and continued into the 20th century. The forest depletion drove the red-cockaded woodpecker from a one time population of more than 1.5 million birds to fewer than 11,000 by 1999.
The birds clung to pockets of native pine woodlands in places such as Jones State Forest, established in 1926 for research into forest management by Texas A&M Forestry Service. In 1949, it was named for pioneering Texas conservationist William Goodrich Jones.
Jones Forest includes longleaf and shortleaf pines standing in an open timberland with grassy savannas and herbaceous plants but absent thick woody undergrowth.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers require that kind of pine forest redolent of their ancestral forest with an open view and flight path to nesting cavities and foraging areas. They’re the only North American woodpeckers that build nest cavities in living pine trees.
The woodpeckers pound out a cavity by boring about a 3-inch hole angled upwards into the sapwood and then drilling 7-inches downward. The woodpeckers prefer a fungus-infested pine, a condition called red-heart disease that softens the tree’s pulp.
They then chip away bark around the entrance hole where they drill tiny resin wells into the tree. Sticky pine sap oozes from the wells and drools down the tree trunk beneath the entrance hole to prevent predators, such as black rat snakes, from reaching the cavity.
The birds construct several cavities among a cluster of trees where the family clan works cooperatively to raise their young during spring and summer.
Thanks to intervention by wildlife officials throughout the South, populations of red-cockaded woodpeckers have rebounded from 11,000 to more than 15,500 birds. Future population gains depend on undeveloped breeding outposts like Jones State Forest.