The Red-Cockaded woodpecker was commonly found in pine forests. It was found across the southeastern United States. Its number has decreased to an alarming state due to the destruction of its habitat.
Identification
The red-cockaded woodpecker is black and white in color and possesses a black cap on its head. Male and female species look almost the same except that the male red-cockaded woodpecker has two small red streaks that are present on both the sides of the black cap called a cockaded. (Red-cockaded……) The side of its head is white and its throat is also white. A ladder like arrangement of black and white stripes is present on its back. Its wings are black and white spots are present on them. (Peterson, N/A)

Range of Species
There are some other species of woodpecker that are quite similar to the red-cockaded woodpecker. These are the Hairy Woodpecker and the Downy Woodpecker. Both of them have white backs. Males in both the species have the same two small red streaks that are present on both the sides of the black cap of the red-cockaded woodpecker. These red streaks are absent in females. A small red spot is present behind the eye of the male red-cockaded woodpecker. The back of the black-backed woodpecker is black but it does not have ladder like white stripes. The three-toed woodpecker has a ladder like white stripes on its back. The three-toed woodpecker has large black side of the head and a thin white stripe is present around its eye. (Peterson, N/A)

History
The red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis) was listed as endangered in 1970 based on its perceived rarity and presumed reduction in available nesting habitat. Historically, the woodpecker's home extended from Florida to New Jersey, stretching west to Texas and Oklahoma. (Woodpecker, red-cockaded……) Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that the bird is confined to about 1 percent of its original habitat.

Habitat
One organism that clings to existence in the Bienville Pines and other surviving old-growth pine areas is the red-cockaded woodpecker. It is on the federal list of endangered species. Ornithologist Jerome A. Jackson has studied this woodpecker in great detail and has fought tenaciously for its protection. Unlike most other woodpeckers, which carve out cavities for their nests in dead trees, the red-cockaded woodpecker uses living pine trees, which are able to withstand the fires. The trees must be at least sixty years old, the age at which the center of most southern pine trunks begins to rot from the fungus that causes red heart disease. Over a period of months or even years, the woodpecker penetrates the living tissues of the tree until it reaches the rotting center, which is more easily removed to create a nest or roost cavity. The cavities are used year after year. (Endangered Red-cockaded…….)

As a pine grows older and taller, the lower branches drop off; leaving damaged areas where red heart fungus spores can enter the tree. The woodpecker sometimes digs the opening for its nest cavity near these branch scars. The older and taller the tree, the higher up the woodpecker can make its nest, far above any shrubby vegetation growing beneath the tree. (Hottcamp, 2001) Fires also help by killing the lower vegetation. If shrubs do reach up to the nest cavity, the woodpecker usually abandons it. Some suggest that this abandonment may be due to the increased potential for predators, such as the gray rat snake, to reach the cavity. (Warshall, 1999)

Gray rat snakes can climb trees rapidly, an ability that may enable them to escape ground fires; however, they have an aversion to the gummy resin that pine stems produce. To capitalize on this, the red-cockaded woodpecker chisels numerous small holes around the opening into the nest cavity. (Jackson & Hamrick, 1996) Thick gummy pine resin exudes from these "resin wells," flowing all around the entrance of the nest cavity Gray rat snakes climbing a tree with nest cavities stop and try to turn around when they reach the pine gum and typically fall from the tree. They are unable to get past this barrier unless the resin dries out and is not re-covered by fresh resin.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers have a distinctive social life. They live in clans of two to nine birds, each member roosting in its tree cavity. Each clan includes only one breeding pair; the other birds are usually this pair's young male offspring, one to three years old, which help dig resin wells, incubate eggs, and feed hatchlings. When the breeding male dies, one of the young males in the clan usually assumes the dominant role. According to Jackson, the young females leave the clan by winter and fly around nearby in search of a clan that has lost its breeding female. For a population to survive, then, several clans of woodpeckers must occupy a continuous stand of pines. (Wishard, 1998)

Reason for Decline
At the beginning of this century, the South was blanketed by the greatest old-growth pine forest on the continent. A traveler could ride from the Carolina Tidewater clear to Big Thicket in eastern Texas shaded virtually the entire way by the great native pines. And, throughout the entire range, the traveler would have seen the red-cockaded woodpecker and heard its lilting staccato. (Reimer, 1997)

Then the timber barons came at the turn of the century, which moved south from the heavily harvested timberlands around the Great Lakes, stripping the South's trees and leaving a mined landscape in their wake. The woodpecker vanished at the pace of the clear-cuts, for it can nest only in the cavities it excavates from tall, old pines whose interior wood has been softened by a fungus that causes red heart disease. Only one thing kept this native creature from extinction: the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Because agriculture and lumbering have broken up the old-growth forests, the number of red-cockaded woodpeckers has plummeted to perhaps 10,000 birds. On top of this, in the autumn of 1989, Hurricane Hugo knocked down 80 to 90 percent of the nest trees in South Carolina's Francis Marion National Forest, which supported one of the largest populations of red-cockaded woodpeckers. (Hanula & Engstrom, 2000)

The arrival of Smokey Bear in 1944 sped the departure of the woodpecker, for as fires were put out, the open, park like character of the forest was changed and a brush and hardwood mid story developed. The new face of the land not only attracted species that competed with the woodpecker for food and nesting sites, but, in some cases, the new mid story growth actually obstructed the birds' flight path to their nest cavities. In many cases, the birds abandoned their homes and looked for new habitat elsewhere. (Jackson & Hamrick, 1996)

Efforts to Restore Prognosis for Survival
After this Southern wood- pecker was listed as endangered, skeptics in the industry began to predict doom. They worried that the red-cockaded woodpecker listing would herald an environmental train wreck whereby conservationists and loggers would battle head-to-head over the birds' nesting sites and rounds of lawsuits and countersuits would shut down much of the regional timber industry. No train wreck resulted, though. No lawsuits. No "us vs. them" rhetoric. The timber industry and such landowners as the military and individual families have made peace with the woodpecker, embracing it on their land and woodlots. Theirs is a Southern success story that demonstrates how jobs and the environment can grow together.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries signed an agreement with the Hancock Timber Resource Group that protects three of the last five groups of red-cockaded woodpeckers left in the state of Virginia. Following those breakthroughs, Champion International Corp. set aside 2,000 acres in Texas solely for these woodpeckers, hoping to initiate an increase in their population from two groups to 20. Less than a year later, Westvaco Corp. signed our fourth red-cockaded woodpecker agreement, promising to protect and manage a population of 16 groups in South Carolina. Each step toward habitat preservation helps business move from hindsight to foresight, from reaction to prevention. Each agreement reinforces the last and sets a path for dozens more to follow. Potlatch manages 15,000 acres of its forested habitat for the rare, native bird while making a significant contribution to the recovery of the species by protecting habitat for the 44 nesting red-cockaded woodpecker groups that live there. At the same time, federal foresters and land managers are also being retrained to manage woodpecker habitat better. The Southern states are home to many of the great national forests and national parks, ranging from Sam Houston National Forest in Texas to Apalachicola National Forest and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. For decades it was customary for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service to summarily extinguish the frequent naturally occurring ground fires that in the past burned back the hardwood under story and left the ancient, fire-resistant pines to stand with abundant open space between them. (FISH/WILDLIFE AGENCY, 1999)

Today the Forest Service has reversed its course; Southern forest managers are leading the nation in bringing prescribed fires back. So is the Air Force; (Lipske, 1996) in Eglin's 320,000-acre remnant of longleaf pine forest, for instance, managers set controlled fires in addition to those caused by munitions tests. Thanks to the rejuvenating flames, the forest has begun to regain some of its original character and richness. And woodpeckers are following close behind. This Southern approach allows more than the large industrial, military, and federal landowners to work with natural rhythms. It also helps federal regulators shift from command and control toward incentives that encourage care and effort by private landowners, no matter how small their holdings. Consider, for example, "Safe Harbor" habitat (Lipsey, 1999) concept for individual wood-lot owners. Under a Safe Harbor agreement, someone whose land management helps increase the number of woodpeckers on his or her property bears no additional legal responsibilities for subsequent groups of birds that might be attracted to the property. He or she is only responsible for the birds that were present at the time of the Safe Harbor agreement. The plan offers private landowners incentives to be both good stewards of their land and to provide habitat for endangered and threatened species. (Smith, 1999)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also currently working with several states, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas, to develop habitat conservation plans for isolated groups of woodpeckers. Under the new plan, if a landowner nurtures juvenile woodpeckers on his or her land, incentive credits will be received. Those credits can be accumulated by the landowner to use him or they can be sold to another landowner who wishes to harvest timberland currently restricted by the Endangered Species Act. Individual landowners who wish to use incentive credits to harvest trees must give the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 60 days' notice so that state and federal wildlife biologists will have sufficient time to transfer the endangered birds to a national, state, or private forest where a larger woodpecker population may already thrive. (Stroup, 1995)
By providing a common goal for the entire South in this particular case, the Endangered Species Act is working. But its meaning goes far beyond that. Thanks to this act, a new generation of managers, soldiers, loggers, real-estate developers, and private woodlot owners are approaching their native landscape in a different and, I think, better way than their ancestors did. For them forests are measured by more than simple location or board feet; they now have a context, an age, and a history and become bridges that link the present human world to our complex natural heritage.

The return on the investment is witnessing and participating in the renaissance of our native longleaf pine forests as well as proving that we as citizens can pass along the strongest timber economy, the best-trained troops, and the most beautiful and biologically diverse natural heritage to future generations of Americans.