|
HCPs, Safe Harbor reap benefits for red-cockaded woodpecker
DANIEL CUSICK, LAND LETTER 3/31/05
ATLANTA -- Conventional wisdom once held that in much of the forested Southeast the only thing worse than having a red-cockaded woodpecker occupy your land was to have a federal regulator come around to save it.
Property owners took all kinds of measures to ensure they did not incur a "woodpecker problem" -- even if it meant destroying their native forests and any income potential they might reap from timber harvesting or other economic uses.
The red-cockaded woodpecker, meanwhile, continued its slide toward probable extinction.
No more, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has been working to recover the endangered bird for decades.
In one of the more promising turnarounds for an imperiled species and its habitat, an estimated 5,800 red-cockaded woodpeckers today enjoy well over 3 million acres of managed forest across a wide swath of the South, including 637,000 acres of private land.
According to FWS census counts, the woodpecker experienced a 23 percent population boom in a decade, from 1994 to 2004, while privately managed woodpecker habitat under FWS programs has gone from virtually nothing to covering some of the largest forested tracts in the Southeast, including large timber holdings, golf courses, hunting preserves and other privately held acreage.
These private lands, combined with several million acres managed for woodpeckers in state and national forests and on military reservations, create a solid patchwork of habitat that federal officials say they never dreamed of just a decade ago.
"In 1992, we had zero acres, zero woodpeckers and zero private landowners engaged with us on protection efforts," said Ralph Costa, who directs FWS's red-cockaded recovery program from the agency's Clemson, S.C., field office. "Today we have 235 private landowner partners and 475 groups of woodpeckers in partnerships on private lands."
The resurgence of the small, black-and-white mottled bird that nests in the cavities of tall pine trees emerges from two of the more controversial programs ever conceived under the Endangered Species Act, yet one that a growing number of private landowners seems to like -- Habitat Conservation Plans and Safe Harbor agreements.
Unlike conventional regulatory approaches where landowners with endangered species on their property have to become unwitting species managers, Safe Harbor and HCPs rely on cooperative agreements whereby owners retain many of their property rights in exchange for maintaining habitat for a specific number of species.
Relocating birds to build populations
Since the mid-1990s, when the first HCPs and Safe Harbor agreements were signed to aid red-cockadeds, the program has grown into an emerging national model for private-public species management.
Safe Harbor agreements for a variety of species are now in place in 16 states, including six states known to have red-cockaded woodpeckers.
Foresters like Lamar Comalander, vice president of Milliken Forestry Co. in Columbia, S.C., say the red-cockaded woodpecker programs run by FWS and endorsed by Environmental Defense and others have turned thousands of landowners generally opposed to federal regulation into endangered species advocates.
"They see it as a good government program, for once, and as a way to better define their liabilities if they have woodpeckers," Comalander said. "As far as a government program goes, it's unusual in that it actually works.
One of the largest and most noted red-cockaded woodpecker agreements involves the forest products conglomerate International Paper Co., which in 1999 began managing an experimental forest in south Georgia for woodpeckers using a kind of mitigation bank. Under the company's HCP, endangered woodpeckers from other company lands could be relocated to the 5,300-acre Southlands Forest in Bainbridge, Ga., freeing International Paper to cut from its extensive forest holdings elsewhere.
"Their mission is not to get rid of their woodpeckers, but to put them in one place," Costa said. "Isolated groups of three or four animals just don't survive over time. The idea was to grow groups of birds on Southlands and use those as mitigation for birds removed from other areas."
Craig Hedman, who manages the woodpecker program for International Paper, said that as recently as 10 years ago, Southlands Forest's predominant longleaf pine habitat supported only three male woodpeckers, down from an estimated 20 to 25 birds in four or five breeding groups surveyed in the early 1970s.
Today the same forest supports approximately 50 woodpeckers in 15 groups, with 13 potential breeding pairs, Hedman said. Under the terms of the HCP, International Paper must work toward a baseline of 18 breeding pairs, consisting of a mating male and female, and any offspring from that pair.
"This gives us maximum flexibility, but we're still maintaining the birds as part of our [forest] portfolio," Hedman said. "We can move birds around in our own population and return these lands in other locations to more conventional forest management practices."
The practice of relocating red-cockaded woodpeckers, usually juveniles that have not yet mated, has proven so successful that FWS is now moving birds from forest to forest all over the Southeast. Where sizable woodpecker populations are stable and even thriving -- such as within Florida's Apalachicola National Forest or at several military bases in Georgia and the Carolinas -- young birds are being siphoned off to build populations in other areas, mostly other public forests and wildlife refuges.
The spotted owl of the Southeast?
Besides the 30-year International Paper agreement and 15 other HCPs of smaller scale, FWS has extended its public-private partnership concept to a much larger group of private landowners under its Safe Harbor program, which began as an effort to manage red-cockaded woodpeckers at one of the nation's premier championship golf courses, Pinehurst, in North Carolina.
Similar to HCPs in that they allow greater flexibility and certainty, Safe Harbor has proven especially popular with both small and large landowners who want species-rich forests but fear managing endangered species would lead to cumbersome regulation and the loss of their land's economic value.
Costa recalls how until fairly recently, landowners in the South would harvest immature pine forests at greatly reduced profit simply to avoid attracting woodpeckers. "People were so afraid of the Endangered Species Act and the red-cockaded woodpecker that they were actually destroying habitat," he said. "Now we have the same landowners willing to work to restore that habitat. It's a complete change of mindset."
In virtually all of the Southeastern states with woodpecker Safe Harbor agreements, landowners do not even have to negotiate with federal regulators. They simply have to register with the appropriate state agency, which usually holds a blanket Safe Harbor agreement that can be applied to all private lands within the state's boundaries.
Louisiana was the latest to adopt a statewide Safe Harbor agreement, following Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia (Land Letter, July 29, 2004). Alabama and Florida are close to finalizing similar deals, while Mississippi has adopted Safe Harbor for another endangered species, the gopher tortoise.
Robert Bonnie of Environmental Defense, a strong proponent of Safe Harbor agreements, said he remembers talk of the red-cockaded woodpecker becoming "the spotted owl of the Southeast," with heated clashes between regulators and landowners over timber rights like those seen in the Pacific Northwest with the northern spotted owl. Instead, he said, "What you've got is an environment where foresters, landowners, agencies and environmentalists are all working together.
"So the war that everybody feared in the wake of the spotted owl never happened. In fact, something entirely different happened, and it has benefited both landowners and birds," he said.
Safe Harbor, HCPs under fire from some
Yet despite its success engaging once-reluctant landowners in species management, FWS has drawn fire from some environmentalists over its growing use of Safe Harbor and HCPs.
Leeona Klippstein, executive director of the Spirit of the Sage Council, which is engaged on red-cockaded woodpecker issues, said such agreements allow powerful private interests like International Paper to skirt the Endangered Species Act and remove species from lands where profit takes priority over protection.
"They're taking [woodpeckers] away from their natural range and distribution and bringing them to their so-called experimental forest and putting them in boxes," she said, referring to the artificial cavities managers build into trees to try to attract and retain woodpeckers.
Klippstein also noted that FWS's agreement with International Paper does not require that the company succeed in restoring woodpecker populations across all its lands, which stretch from Virginia to Texas, but only that it work toward achieving 18 bird pairs in one forest. "And if they are successful, they get credits -- like pollution credits -- that they can trade to other companies that want to destroy habitat," she said. "I don't know how that works toward recovery."
But proponents of the agreements say their success is proven by the bird's growing numbers. "It's hard to argue against more woodpeckers," said Bonnie of Environmental Defense.
But Costa cautioned against predictions of downlisting the woodpecker from "endangered" to "threatened" anytime soon. While certain populations are gaining in numbers, he said it will take 50 or more years of sustained growth before the woodpecker is sufficiently recovered to warrant such a change. And it could be 70 years before the woodpecker is eligible for removal from the endangered species list.
"It took us 400 years to put this ecosystem in the condition it's in today," Costa said. "We now have enough land to meet our recovery goals. The things that limit it are economics and time. Unfortunately it's not something I'm going to get to see. It will take multiple more decades."
| |
