In the Forest With Endangered Species

Photos and Text by: Jared Lloyd

I’m sitting in the most comfortable “blind” I have ever used. At the moment, the temperature is in the upper 60s, a light wind blows through the forest out of the northeast, and the glow of the sun is still filtering through the forest behind me.

Technically speaking, this isn’t a blind at all. It’s actually a rooftop tent I have set up on my old Land Rover. But a blind is what I am using it as, and so a blind is what it is for the day.

I pretty much make this stuff up as I go.

Me, I spend a fair amount of time camping for my wildlife photography. It’s the nature of the beast when you do this stuff for a living. More often than not, the animals I am photographing are nowhere near a Marriott.

For years I camped on the ground next a campfire, under the stars. Then it was a tent. Then a hammock. But during the pandemic, I purchased a rooftop tent manufactured by a Boulder, Colorado, based company called Roof Nest, and have converted the thing (only for the day) into a rooftop blind for photographing bird nests.

The species in question today is endangered. Red-cockaded woodpeckers are endemic to the longleaf pine forests of the southeastern United States and was one of the first species placed on the endangered species list – landing there some 3 years before the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Barely 7 inches tall, with a wingspan of only 15 inches, this little bird holds the key to the health and wealth of an entire forest in its beak.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are what we call ecological engineers. This is a term reserved for species with an oversized impact on the ecology around them. And as the phrase implies, the red-cockaded woodpecker, or RCW in bird nerd, quite literally shapes the world in which they live.

An ecological, or more appropriately termed: ecosystem engineer, is a species that changes the habitat and directly impacts the availability of resources for other species in an ecosystem. Beavers are probably the best-known examples of this by the general public. Beavers move in, dam streams, and thus create ponds and wetlands that completely alter the environment and the species in that environment. When you add a beaver dam to a stream, you suddenly create house and home for a grocery list of species that never could have survived there before.

This is what the red-cockaded woodpecker does in the longleaf pine forest.

Longleaf forests are a highly flammable place. Everything about the longleaf habitat, from the pine trees themselves to the wire grass that grows beneath, help to encourage fire. This is nothing like the lodgepole pine forests of the West. Instead, most of the plants in the longleaf pine forest evolved to promote fire as a means of removing competition for finite resources. Which means on average, fires come sweeping through the forest floor ever 2 – 5 years.

This type of fire ecology has a big impact on the availability of nesting and denning habitat for the species that make their living there. Blue birds, for instance, require nesting cavities in trees to survive. So too do screech owls, fox squirrels, southern flying squirrels, and a long list of other species. Normally, all these species would nest or den inside of old dead trees – one of the reason the worst thing you can do for your property is to remove dead trees. But in the longleaf, an ecosystem that is regularly baptized in fire, such dead trees are practically non-existent.

And this is where the little red-cockaded woodpecker comes into play.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers are the only species of bird that can carve out a cavity inside of a living longleaf pine tree. Longleaf pines produce a tremendous amount of sap when damaged – part of their evolution for living with fire. Researchers in the longleaf pine forests routinely find other species encapsulated in tombs of sap after trying to excavate a cavity in one of these trees. But not the red-cockaded woodpecker, who evolved in this unique ecosystem and has not only learned how to manage all the sap when excavating a tree cavity but has also discovered how to create sap wells all around their cavity to both deter, and in the case of snakes, kill nest raiding predators.

So, what you end up with is a situation in which every single species of bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile, and insect in the ecosystem that needs a safe place to nest or den or take cover from fires, is 100% dependent upon the red-cockaded woodpecker for those cavities and thus their ability to even live in the longleaf pine forest.

All said and done, over 30 different species depend upon the red-cockaded woodpeckers’ presence in the forest for their own survival.

Remove the RCW, and all those species cease to exist there as well.

Two baby eastern screech owls looking out of an abandoned red cockaded woodpecker cavity in Croatan National Forest, North Carolina.

I have spent years exploring the longleaf savannas of the American southeast simply because few other wildlife photographers do. But then again, maybe there is more to it than than that. These forests are a strange admixture of grassland and trees – the real definition of the word savanna. And the whole of the place reminds me of the late E. O. Wilson’s theory known as Biophilia.

If you’re not familiar with this idea, it’s basically the theory that humans have an innate need to make connections with the natural world and other forms of life. It’s why we have dogs and cats. It’s why we bring plants into our houses. Biophilia is the subconscious need we have to interact with, or be around, other species.

But Wilson goes even further than this in suggesting that humans also have a baked in association with landscapes as well.

Every species has a “natural” habitat that they are built for and drawn to. Oystercatchers like their estuaries and oyster bars. Screech owls like their edge habitat with access to open fields or grasslands or savannas or suburban parks. Whitetail deer associate with forest while their mule deer cousins opt for wide open spaces – something you can easily see for yourself at a place like the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge near Denver, Colorado. Grizzly bears do their thing out in the open sagebrush or alder chocked valleys, while black bears stick to the forest. These are, of course, but a few quick examples.

So, if every species on the planet has a particular habitat they seek out even when transplanted or migrating or immigrating, then why would we assume that humans are any different? At the end of the day, we are nothing more than mammals ourselves – not unlike raccoons and red backed voles in this respect.

When we look at art, especially landscape paintings and photographs, we quickly find that there is indeed a deep psychological association with very specific landscapes that mirror our own origins. Sure, most people retain an attachment to landscapes that they grew up in as a child. But this is different. This is deeper.

Did you know, after leaving the African continent, humans settled Australia some 20,000 years BEFORE they made it to Western Europe? It seems odd given how close Africa is to Europe. But the primary reason for this, we assume, is that modern humans stuck to coastlines as they migrated out of Africa and into Asia, following the sea all the way to Australia.

Today, oceans draw people to their shores by the billions each year. Why?

Why also is it that when an FMRI is attached to people’s heads, we find that staring out over the ocean has the same measurable effect on brain activity as deep meditation?

When we look at landscape art and try to discern universal patterns in what people find attractive, a very clear picture begins to emerge that transcends cultures and continents and civilizations.

The love of coastlines is almost universal, for instance. So too is the love of mountains, especially scenes in which mountains are distant and a river runs prominently through the composition. People love open canopy forests filled with large and ancient trees – much as we see with almost every public city or town park across the United States.

The innate association with these landscapes in art is universal. Some, of course, find coastlines more appealing than paintings of mountains. But from Kansas to Kazakistan, these landscapes are what tug at people’s hearts. And each one of these landscapes factored prominently into our evolution as a species.

Open savannas, distant mountains, and a great river. This describes the Great Rift Valley almost perfectly. And the coastlines, where our species took up residence and spent nearly 100,000 years following after immigrating from the Great Rift Valley, is a landscape that also appears to be baked into us.

Thus, for me, perched high above the forest floor in an impromptu blind, looking out over the longleaf pine savanna, I can’t help but to think that it’s this sort of epigenetic memory of the places that once shaped my own species that I find so alluring, intoxicating, and strangely beautiful about this landscape.

Such are the things I think about when spending long hours in the field. Free from the trappings and distractions of our hyper-stimulated lives, the mind is set free to wander the entirety of the universe.

Although we colloquially use the term savanna to reference a hot dry grassland in the tropical or subtropical regions of the world, from a more academic perspective, or ecologically minded definition, this is a place where grasslands and forest intermix with an open canopy and a park like setting. Yes, this is a grassland. But it is also a forest. In this savanna, trees are spaced out at roughly 50 – 100 feet or so, each one needing extra room to exist in dry sandy soils that so characterize this particular region. And here along the coastal plain of North Carolina, these savannas are functionally islands broken up by pocosin swamps.

The word pocosin comes from the Carolina Algonquian language, meaning “swamp on a hill.”

If that isn’t an oxymoronic term, then I don’t know what is. But understand this: these pocosin here sit within the fingerprints of an extinction level event that abruptly brought the last glacial maxim to and end.

We call it the Clovis commit. Somewhere around 12,000 years ago, a commit either crashed into, or exploded overtop of, the Luarentide Ice Sheet that covered most of northern North America. The area of impact is what we call the Great Lakes today.

From New Jersey to Florida, and then west to Texas and Arizona, you can find elliptical shaped depressions in the landscape. Some are small. Some are hundreds of acres. All of them have a large and distinct berm at the end of them. All of them contain huge quantities of iridium – a metal that only seems to come from astrological events such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. And all of them, when plotted out on a map, point directly back to the Great Lakes.

Along the east coast of the United States, these depressions are called Carolina Bays. The name “bay” has nothing to with water, however. Instead, they were coined Carolina Bays because of the diversity of bay tree species found within them, and the fact that not only were the Carolinas the first place these were discovered, but the Carolinas are where the vast majority of them are concentrated.

No one really understood the magnitude of all this until airplanes. It wasn’t until aviators began seeing these things from the air that people took notice and began studying them.

Prior to aerial photography and satellite imagery, coming upon one of these swamps would have meant first encountering the berm that surrounded them. These berms are raised areas. They’re hills. They divert water and impact the flow of creeks and rivers. You physically walk up a small hill where the pocosin swamp then sits inside the depression on top. Hence: swamp on a hill.

This is where things begin to get really interesting for a nerd like myself. Pocosin are an impenetrable tangle of woody vegetation. Pond and loblolly pines grow here interspersed with all those bays – red bay, sweet bay, and loblolly bay. But it’s the overlap here, the Venn diagram of longleaf savanna and pocosin into what’s known as an eco tone, where a most savage garden grows.

Despite the almost desert like feel to this place at times, I’m sitting in the most important carnivorous plant biodiversity hotspot in the world. More appropriately termed insectivorous plants, the eco tones here, what the overlap of two habitats is called in ecology, play home to 16 different species of these real life Little Shop of Horror like plants. Most famously, this place is home to the Venus flytrap – a plant that only grows naturally within a roughly 80 mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina.

All of this is what I see when I look out of the window of my blind / rooftop tent.

Last week, Annalise and I spent day after day working endangered red-cockaded woodpecker nests. But those have officially fledged and so we switched gears.

As I mentioned in my last dispatch from the forest, red-cockaded woodpeckers are what we call ecosystem engineers in that their very presence in these woods allow for a cornucopia of other species to exist here that would never be able to survive without them. For this reason, being able to identify old and abandoned nesting cavities will often offer up a litany of other species and subjects to photograph – as long as you have the patience to wait and watch and observe.

Scouting these places in the spring is usually characterized by hours spent peering through my Swarovski 10x42 binoculars. I’m looking for movement. I’m looking for anomalies. I’m looking for fresh chipped wood. For a single tuff of downy feather caught inside the cavity, or even a single strand of hair. All these things become the clues or signs of use. While other things, like the presence of a spider web, suggests the opposite.

During one such scouting trip in search of nests, we noticed a smallish bird dart from behind a tree. Even a cursory glance of the trunk told us this was unquestionably an old red-cockaded woodpecker nesting tree. As I discussed in my previous article about these birds, red-cockaded woodpeckers have learned to manipulate the extraordinary quantities of sap produced by the longleaf pines for their use. In addition to the nesting cavity itself, these little carpenteros (the much more eloquent sounding Spanish name for woodpeckers) also drill “sap wells” in the trunk of the pines.

From these wells run an almost continuous river of resin. An active red-cockaded tree will glisten in the sun from all the fresh sap oozing down the trunk of a tree. Abandoned trees, on the other hand, look as though the whole of the thing was dipped in wax from decades worth of sap oozing and drying in the sun.

Decades are not an exaggeration here. It takes an average of 7 years for a red-cockaded woodpecker to excavate a new cavity in a longleaf pine tree. And this fact has impacted the evolution of the species in some really unique ways.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers live in family groups comprised of mom, dad, and a generation or two of brothers. Upon fledging, after about 6 months of hanging out with the family, females take off to find a new family to join. The boys stick around, however, and help raise the next few generations worth of chicks year after year.

Because it takes so long for a new cavity to be excavated, you often find a cluster of cavity trees in a small area. Some are roosts. Some, a little further off, will hopefully be new nesting cavities one day. But the strategy here is to stick it out with the family, helping the next generations, while hoping to inherit dad’s territory and cavity trees. When the father dies, the eldest son in the family inherits the cluster of trees and the other couple generations of brothers move on to try and continue working on cavities they began years ago.

The result is that prime nesting trees have often been used for a couple decades by a family of red-cockaded woodpeckers and bears the tremendous quantity of dried sap to prove it.

As if the old sap encrusted tree wasn’t enough to tip us off of the possibility of a cavity on the southwest side of the tree, there was also a large white stripe painted at the base of the trunk as well. Many years ago, researchers took up the habit of painting white stripes on red-cockaded trees in order to make relocating them easier.

Within seconds, another bird flew in to the tree and we knew instantly what we were looking at: an eastern bluebird nest!