Persistence In The Pines

Sussex County, Virginia—On a cornflower-blue morning, Chance Hines balances on a ladder chained to a tree, high overhead. The tree is a longleaf pine, one of thousands in the Piney Grove Preserve, a picturesque pine savanna in southeastern Virginia owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Staff and volunteers gather around the tree’s base, waiting for him to finish his delicate task. At this particular tree, it’s taking a bit longer than usual. 

Wearing a cloth pouch around his neck, Hines has climbed up to fetch baby red-cockaded woodpeckers from their cavity within the tree and bring them to the ground. There, he and his partner, Laura Duval, both research biologists with the Center for Conservation Biology at The College of William and Mary, will quickly weigh and band them as part of ongoing monitoring and data collection for these rare and imperiled birds. This cavity is one of five the group will visit on this day, with more planned over the coming week. The window in which they can easily fetch and band the chicks, before they grow larger and feistier, is short. 

Widely referred to simply as RCWs, red-cockaded woodpeckers are robin-sized birds that are named for the tiny red streak, or cockade, behind the eyes of the species’ adult males. The non-migratory species lives exclusively in fire-dependent pine forests, in which the regular incidence of fire maintains the mature canopy and open understory that the species requires for food and shelter. Piney Grove is a prime example of this ideal habitat, with tall pines visible in every direction and relatively open undergrowth, the result of TNC's regular controlled burns. 

Once spread widely across the southeastern United States, RCWs suffered from a precipitous decline primarily due to habitat fragmentation and loss and suppression of naturally occurring fire. In 1970, the federal government listed the species as endangered under a law that was a precursor to the Endangered Species Act, enacted three years later. By the late 1970s, the species was edging dangerously close to extinction, having disappeared from several states altogether and with fewer than 1,500 clusters (family groups of about two to five birds) remaining, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). 

A half-century later, however, RCWs are experiencing something of a rebound, one promising enough that, in 2024, USFWS downlisted the species from endangered to threatened. In doing so, the agency recognized that decades of collaborative conservation efforts and pineland management by federal, state, and local governments and private partners have made a positive impact, allowing growing numbers of these fragile birds to establish breeding clusters and have the ecological support they need. As of 2024, USFWS estimated that about 7,800 RCW clusters exist across 11 states from southern Virginia to eastern Texas. 

Today, in addition to privately managed places like Piney Grove and other lands that are protected under conservation easements or so-called safe harbor agreements, RCWs can be found at Big Cypress National Preserve and Big Thicket National Preserve in the National Park System (and have been spotted in Everglades National Park and other national parks); other federal lands including forests, national wildlife refuges, and military bases; and state lands such as the Big Woods Wildlife Management Area in Virginia. 

It is worth noting, however, that some groups, including the Southern Environmental Law Center and Defenders of Wildlife, decried the downlisting, saying it was premature in light of climate-change impacts and habitat destruction. The bird remains on the state endangered list in states including Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It is currently listed as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. Land managers and biologists say that vigilance and commitment to the species’ continued recovery is necessary. 

“When we purchased this land [in 1998], and this was the northernmost extent of their habitat, they were still federally endangered,” says Andi Clinton, a Virginia pinelands restoration specialist for TNC. “What we're really finding is lack of management means lack of birds. And lack of management comes from lack of committed resources. Because you can't one-off it.”

Over the last two decades, the organization has steadily expanded its controlled burn program, which has allowed specific, ecologically niche plants to grow that support RCW populations. With just a handful of RCWs on the property when it was purchased, the preserve now boasts about 23 breeding clusters, or about 100 adults. 

South Florida is witnessing positive signs of recovery as well. Jessica Spickler is a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, a frequent collaborator with the National Park Service when it comes to RCW management in South Florida. Spickler notes that active clusters in the state have steadily grown to just under 2,500 over the past few years. “I think that's really encouraging to hear, and it's the main story in areas where they're occurring across the country,” she says. 

At Big Cypress, the primary pine species is slash pine, which is a somewhat lower-nutrient landscape for the birds, ecologically, than the longleaf pine forest found farther north, Spickler says. So RCWs require larger territory sizes on which to form clusters and forage. Here, too, prescribed burns are essential to promoting biological diversity and a healthy ecosystem; in 2026, NPS has planned controlled burns in four strategic areas of Big Cypress covering more than 81,000 acres. 

“All of the areas that these birds currently exist on, with a few exceptions, are pretty much public land,” Spickler notes. “So it's state and federally held lands that are being managed for the health of those pine ecosystems. It's very much an ‘if you build it, they will come’ scenario, where if you're taking this overgrown pine habitat and turning it into that, like, open park-like structure, the birds will just naturally want to live there.”

Spickler points to interagency cooperation and dedicated land managers as the root of the recovery efforts. The commission is part of the Southern Range Translocation Cooperative, a network of agencies, military installations, and private landowners that work to introduce RCWs from thriving populations into other areas to encourage new breeding and bolster struggling flocks.

“In the 1970s, it was researchers, biologists, and land managers that had to get together to figure out, ‘Okay, how are we going to turn this around?’” Spickler notes. “They wrote the rulebook for us, where if we do this amount of burning, or this amount of habitat treatment to reduce mid-story height of these woody species, and if we increase the herbaceous ground cover…if we do all of these things, if we create artificial cavities for them to nest and roost in [where needed]…these are all things that basically were developed in the '70s, '80s, and '90s and are what we have used since then to continue growing these populations.”

Chance Hines and Laura Duval of the Center for Conservation Biology at The College of William and Mary, along with staff and volunteers from The Nature Conservancy, work to collect and band red-cockaded woodpecker chicks at the Piney Grove Preserve in southeastern Virginia. / Kim O'Connell