New efforts aim to protect red-cockaded woodpeckers

By ERIC STAATS, emstaats@naplesnews.com
June 20, 2004

Collier County's urban edge hasn't been a hospitable place for red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Development, wildfires, a hurricane, the spread of non-native plants and suspicious incidents have ganged up to leave the small birds with less room to spread their wings.

Now, new efforts to preserve red-cockaded woodpeckers along the county's urban edge are taking shape, but biologists disagree about where to draw the line against further habitat loss.

This much seems clear: The birds won't survive in Collier County without some human intervention.

"It's going to take a lot more money and time to establish a population that is secure," said Kim Dryden, who has tracked the bird's decline in Collier County and now works on Everglades projects for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The woodpecker that might be flitting around your back yard is probably not a red-cockaded woodpecker.

They get their name from a rarely visible streak of red, called a cockade, on the side of the male's head. The bird has a black-and-white-striped back, the top of its head is black and its cheeks are white. They are small, measuring only about 7 inches long.

Roy DeLotelle knows as much about red-cockaded woodpeckers as anybody.

His office is in Gainesville, but he spends a lot of his time on the road, keeping an eye on red-cockaded woodpeckers around Florida.

"This is what they do most of the day is peck on pine trees," said DeLotelle, showing off video he shot of woodpeckers doing their thing.

The woodpeckers have two basic necessities: a place to nest and a place to look for food. They have specific requirements for both, and both are becoming scarcer in Collier County.

The birds nest in holes they bore out of the trunks of old pine trees, called cavity trees. The old trees are softer than young trees and easier to excavate.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are the only woodpeckers to nest in live trees, and experts theorize that the birds tap the trees' sap so it drips down the trunk and deters predators.

For foraging, the birds prefer open, park-like areas. The birds often abandon areas where too much underbrush has grown up.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers live in family groups, usually of two to seven birds.

The bird is on the federal list of endangered species but the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission changed the bird's status from threatened to only a "species of special concern" in 2003.

About 12,500 red-cockaded woodpeckers remain from Florida to Virginia to eastern Texas, about 1 percent of its original range.

Last stand

In Collier County, precise figures on the number of red-cockaded woodpeckers don't exist. One reason is that surveys count family groups of birds, not individuals. Besides that, the numbers seem to depend on who is doing the counting.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission figures put the number of family groups at 26 in 1990 and 15 in 2001, or about a 37 percent loss, along the county's urban edge

DeLotelle paints a bleaker picture. He estimates that only six groups were still hanging on in 1999.

Neither count includes the Big Cypress National Preserve, where biologists know of 59 family groups that produce an average of 30 nestlings each year. The populations might even be increasing, preserve biologist Deb Jansen said.

Along the county's urban edge, red-cockaded woodpeckers are making their last stand in pine forests around the Interstate 75 interchange at Collier Boulevard.

In the early 1990s, as development marched eastward along Davis Boulevard and Radio Road, wildlife officials struggled to come up with a plan to save places for red-cockaded woodpeckers.

"I don't think those efforts were fast enough and ever official enough to be successful," said Dryden, who worked for the Conservation Commission at the time.

Without an overall plan, wildlife agencies ended up trying to save habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers one development proposal at a time. Results were mixed, Dryden said.

In cases where landowners didn't come in for permits, the land was left to be overtaken by non-native species that choked off the land's usefulness as foraging habitat.

Wildfires have burned out red-cockaded woodpecker habitat in areas where landowners haven't conducted prescribed burns to reduce the fire fuel load. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew toppled a half-dozen cavity trees in East Naples, Dryden said.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers can take up to three years to excavate a cavity so losing one can have big consequences.

Other impacts appear to have been more deliberate. Dryden said someone cut down cavity trees at the southwest corner of Immokalee Road and I-75 during the Christmas holiday one year and the Thanksgiving holiday the next year. No one was ever caught.

Investigators also found owl decoys placed on the property in an apparent attempt to scare off the birds, she said.

Wildlife officials also have been unable to explain the mysterious deaths of some cavity trees along Radio Road, Dryden said.

Saving what's left

The history of red-cockaded woodpeckers in Collier County isn't all bad, and the future could be better.

In 1999, DeLotelle began groundbreaking work for the Division of Forestry in the Picayune Strand State Forest south of I-75 and east of Collier Boulevard.

Four male red-cockaded woodpeckers lived in three territories in the state forest but had no females with which to breed.

DeLotelle's work involved relocating females from the Apalachicola National Forest, in northern Florida, where more of the woodpeckers live than anywhere else.

Before the relocation, crews gave the woodpeckers a head start by clearing out overgrowth of non-native plants and inserting artificial cavities into suitable pine trees.

The artificial cavities are essentially wooden boxes that are slid into rectangular spaces that workers carve out of the side of suitable pine trees.

The plan worked. By 2003, there were four new breeding pairs of red-cockaded woodpeckers in the state forest.

Now, a developer has hired DeLotelle to move four red-cockaded woodpeckers that are in the path of development at the 286-acre City Gate Commerce Park at the northeast corner of I-75 and Collier Boulevard. The plan still needs state and federal approval.

It would be the first plan of its kind in Southwest Florida and would mark a significant break from past permitting requirements.

Under City Gate's proposal, DeLotelle would put artificial cavities in four clusters of pine trees in the state forest. Each cluster would have four artificial cavities.

Fledglings from the City Gate site would be relocated to the new clusters in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Adults from City Gate would be moved in 2006, according to the plan. DeLotelle would monitor the artificial cavities until 2009 to see if the plan worked.

"The only thing you can guarantee is that you'll work hard at it," he said.

The plan would overturn a 1990 permit granted to earlier City Gate owners that requires the developer to preserve red-cockaded woodpecker habitat offsite and set aside land onsite until the woodpeckers leave on their own.

Jim Beever, a biologist who reviews permits for the Conservation Commission, said the City Gate project, which qualifies as a Development of Regional Impact, or DRI, is large enough to make room for red-cockaded woodpeckers to stay onsite.

"On a large-scale DRI, you can keep red-cockaded woodpeckers and keep them happy," Beever said.

DeLotelle calls that outdated thinking and called the relocation proposal a "big step in the right direction" for red-cockaded woodpeckers in Collier County.

He said the state forest could eventually be home to 25 to 30 family groups of red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Drawing the line

Developers aren't the only ones with woodpeckers on their minds.

Collier County has kicked off a study of the future of North Belle Meade, a wide open area north of I-75 and east of Collier Boulevard.

North Belle Meade holds at least five clusters of red-cockaded woodpecker trees, all but one on private land. Collier County owns the fifth.

Beever has urged the county to develop an overall plan for red-cockaded woodpecker protection in North Belle Meade that could include buying up pieces of habitat to protect it.

The money could come either from taxpayers or from developers in exchange for permits allowing an impact on habitat elsewhere.

City Gate has tried to buy woodpecker habitat in North Belle Meade for mitigation, but unwilling sellers and escalating land prices have frustrated that effort, City Gate attorney Roger Rice said.

If habitat is left in private hands, any plan for North Belle Meade must provide incentives to encourage landowners to maintain the land for red-cockaded woodpeckers, members of the North Belle Meade study group say.

Even then, as growth continues in North Belle Meade, prescribed burning could become difficult and woodpecker populations will become more isolated, DeLotelle said.

"The opportunities just seem nil up there," he said.

Beever said he isn't ready to write off the North Belle Meade populations.

"Do I have hope for red-cockaded woodpeckers in North Belle Meade? Yeah," he said.