By Molly Kirk/DWR

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced that they are planning to downlist the red-cockaded woodpecker from endangered to threatened status under the federal Endangered Species Act. “This milestone is the result of five decades of collaborative conservation efforts between the Interior Department, federal and state partners, Tribes, the private sector and private landowners that have resulted in increasing populations of these remarkable birds throughout their range,” read the USFWS press release about the decision.

The red-cockaded woodpecker is a year-round resident of pine savanna (open pine forests maintained by frequent fire), and they prefer longleaf pines, but will inhabit other pines, primarily in the southeastern United States. The species is unusual among birds in the way they live in family groups with a highly developed, cooperative breeding system. Family groups use a group of trees, known as a “cluster,” to develop nesting/ roosting cavities in living pine trees.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers were once common in the southeastern U.S. with a range that extended north into New Jersey and largely corresponded to the historic range of pine savanna. However, with the large-scale harvesting of these forests that began in the 1800s, woodpecker populations were decimated, and they are no longer found in some states that originally formed their range. By the 1970s, less than 1,500 clusters of red-cockaded woodpeckers were known to exist, and the species was listed as federally endangered in 1970, when a national Recovery Plan for the red-cockaded woodpecker was developed.

By 2002, only two breeding pairs remained in the Commonwealth, both at what is now Piney Grove Preserve (PGP) in Sussex County. Red-cockaded woodpecker declines, regionally and in Virginia, were the result of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation, largely due to large-scale clear-cutting of pine savannas for timber harvesting and agriculture as well as fire suppression during the 20th century. Fire had a natural, historical, and integral presence in the evolution of pine forest ecosystems in the southeastern U.S. and without it, the open conditions favored by the woodpecker declined.

Under the Endangered Species Act, DWR has a Cooperative Agreement with USFWS to serve as the lead agency for the conservation of protected animal species in Virginia, including red-cockaded woodpecker. In Virginia, intensive habitat conservation efforts both at PGP and on the Big Woods Wildlife Management Area (WMA) by DWR, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and The Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary (CCB)—including application of prescribed fire and longleaf pine plantings—resulted in red-cockaded woodpecker populations at Big Woods and PGP to steadily increase to 74 adults counted at the two properties in 2022.

Today, USFWS estimates there are 7,800 clusters ranging across 11 states from southern Virginia to eastern Texas. Virginia’s red-cockaded woodpecker population is the northernmost population of the species and is limited to the far southeast corner of the state.

Virginia’s red-cockaded woodpecker populations marks the northern border of their current range, and is small relative to the range-wide red-cockaded population recoveries. While DWR celebrates the federal downlisting of the species, the red-cockaded woodpecker will remain listed as state-endangered in Virginia. “Our red-cockaded woodpecker population is so small and largely concentrated in one geographic area that it is vulnerable to storm and weather events that could cause blowdowns of the pines that they depend on, which could be catastrophic for the Virginia population depending on the severity of the ensuing habitat loss,” said Sergio Harding, DWR nongame bird biologist. And if the bird’s range creeps northward due to habitat shifts resulting from changing environmental conditions, Virginia’s population could become more central to the species’ national story.