For 5,000 years, it stood as the majesty of the Southland—a towering pine forest so immense that a traveler could range 2,000 miles and scarcely walk out of it.

When European explorers first set foot on the North American continent, this vast piney woodland—dominated by the stately longleaf pine—stretched across millions of acres from what is now southern New Jersey to Texas.

In many places, huge trees grew naturally so far apart that early settlers could ride their wagons almost straight through the forest without ever touching a road. Travelers were greeted by wide savannas with immense pines shading nearly unbroken carpets of grasses and multi-colored wildflowers.

White settlers eventually pushed the forest's native peoples out, and the trees soon began falling to help build the South. Untold thousands became cracker-style houses that were so solid that no bounce greeted visitors to their porches. Others became railroad ties and poles for fences or lumber.

Gradually, the trees' venerable growing grounds were replaced by pastures, housing tracts, shopping malls, highways, airports and golf courses. By 1930, the longleaf woodland that nature had so bountifully bestowed upon the American South was history.

Today, of 92 million acres of longleaf forest that once graced the South, fully 97 percent is gone, according to the Longleaf Alliance, a research group based at Auburn University. Researchers can count only about 3 million acres remaining, and only less than 10,000 acres of that are considered genuine "old-growth." Virginia, once home to thousands of longleaf acres, reportedly now has only a few dozen individual trees still standing.

As skeletal as it is, the remains of the South's longleaf heritage still represent a natural treasure well worth hanging onto and protecting, say scientists. They argue that what's left of the longleaf forest is a one-of-a-kind ecosystem that if properly managed can continue to produce not only commercially valuable timber but a rich community of wildlife that can help counter a steady decline in species diversity, a phenomenon that has been plaguing the continent for the past century.

Francis James has studied the redcockaded wookpeckers of the Apalachicola National Forest— home to the last large population of the bird— for more than a decade. (right) A tagged woodpecker nestling becomes part of the research aimed at saving the species from extinction.

As it happens, a 30-year-old, embattled federal law aimed at saving plants and animals from extinction may be the only hope left for preserving the remnants of the once-mighty longleaf forest, most of which lie within national forests and the perimeters of military bases. Thanks largely to a small bird most Southerners have never seen, government foresters are gaining momentum in their efforts to save the country's last publicly owned stands of longleaf.

The feds' primary proving ground is the Florida Panhandle's Apalachicola National Forest (ANF), at 570,000 acres the largest national forest east of the Mississippi. The bird is the red-cockaded woodpecker, a species that once flitted about in abundance through Southern pinewoods, its sole habitat on Earth. Since 1970, the bird has been designated "endangered," meeting the criteria of the federal Endangered Species Act. Today, only about 12,500 of the birds are thought to exist in the whole country, and the single largest population lives within an hour's ride of the office of Frances James at Florida State University.

Recognized as one of the foremost avian (bird) ecologists in the world, James recently concluded a decade-long study of the red-cockaded woodpecker in the ANF. It's the most intense look ever made at the bird's life-and-death relationship with the forest, producing what may be the best science available that can be applied to saving both the bird and the forest for perpetuity.

For some years now, James' research has been changing how forest managers and federal wildlife officials think about managing the forest and the endangered species living there. No longer is stopping loggers from clear-cutting-the practice of cutting of all trees at a given site—thought to be enough to save the remaining longleaf pine, says James. A rigorous program of carefully planned burning and specialized tree-thinning also are called for, she believes.

"A common attitude of conservation-minded people is that if you stop clear-cutting, everything will be all right. But in the longleaf pine system it's much more complicated than that."

Economic Loggerhead

By the late 1980s, the plight of the red-cockaded woodpecker had prompted some journalists to describe the bird as "the spotted owl of the South," an allusion to a mounting battle between loggers and environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest over the fate of the Northern spotted owl. That painful conflict turned the worlds of logging communities throughout Oregon and Washington upside down.

By contrast, the controversy in the South over the woodpecker has been negligible. Still, the borders of four counties sprawl across portions of the ANF, and many residents are still angry and resentful over the sudden economic fall-out from a momentous court ruling in 1987.

The Sierra Club that year filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service in Texas, arguing that the practice of clear-cutting—loggers' most cost-effective means of harvesting trees—was imperiling red-cockaded woodpecker habitat. The court agreed, and issued an edict for logging restrictions that eventually were imposed across the bird's entire range.

The ruling dealt yet another blow to sawmills in the Florida Panhandle, already struggling in the face of a weak domestic market for wood products. Timber and pulpwood harvesting never stopped altogether, but loggers were allowed less access to older, more valuable trees—primarily those few remaining stands of decades-old longleaf, trees that form the heart of the woodpeckers' habitat.

Bird scientists had long since documented that the woodpeckers depend on such old trees for their peculiar habits in nest-building (see box, page 31). The birds drill holes ("cavities" to biologists) into the softer trunks of aged trees, usually those at least 90 years old. With no such trees around, the birds simply start to die off, which is why their numbers have plunged in lock step with the destruction of the South's longleaf woodlands.

By the early 1990s, logging restrictions in the ANF were seriously impacting the bottom lines of some of the affected counties. Timber sales that had reached nearly 5 billion cubic feet in 1986 dropped below half that by 1995, when the Forest Service banned clear-cutting on all national forests. The slow-down in timber sales not only cut into the local job market, but also meant less money for schools and roads in the ANF counties. Traditionally, each year these counties had received 25 percent of revenues generated by sales of timber and pulpwood harvested from county lands.

Perhaps no county was affected as much as Liberty County, nearly half of which lies within the forest. In 1987, the county collected $503,000 from forest income; by 1995 the figure had sunk to $50,000. Anger against the lack of timber-cutting ran deep as sawmills began to shut down. At least one local store sold "Woodpecker Helper"—a takeoff on the Hamburger Helper prepared dinner mix.

A policy change in how forest revenues are divvied up, installed in 2000, has since ameliorated the issue somewhat. Counties now receive a percentage of the average annual sales from the whole forest. Liberty County, for example, collected $386,300 in 2001, still less than half of its forestry revenues in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, as the situation with the logging industry has continued to worsen mainly for reasons having little to do with the woodpecker, FSU's James has seen her findings win the praise of both federal foresters and loggers. The basic principles of her research are reflected in a new red-cockaded woodpecker recovery plan proposed to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A draft of the plan now awaits approval in Washington.

Ralph Costa is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recovery coordinator for the bird. He said the recovery plan now pending approval is heavily influenced by James' work.

"Fran's research was and is critical in the recovery," he said "It's playing a major role."

Last Big Haven

Naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries referred to the South's seemingly unending longleaf pine forests as "barrens." They likely were seeing the remnants of forests already logged by earlier settlers and grazed by open-range cattle, says biologist and author Ronald L. Myer.

Those original forests were overwhelmingly made up of a single pine species, the longleaf. These massive trees, which could live to be 400 years old, created shadowy canopies that suppressed the growth of oaks and other hardwoods and underbrush. Frequent ground fires, from lightning and from deliberate burnings set by Indian tribes throughout the forest, kept underbrush under control and created an open, prairie-like setting that made a haven for wildlife of astonishing variety.

But even when the ANF was established in 1936, almost nothing remained of these old-growth longleaf forests within its perimeter. Between 1960 and 1990, fully 40 percent of the ANF served as a tree farm, clear-cut and turned into a plantation for growing slash pine, a fast-growing species largely destined to be ground up into pulp for making products ranging from paper to disposable diapers. But the rest of the acreage was largely left alone.

Today, this part of the forest is where the closest resemblance to an old-growth longleaf environment in the forest can be found. These stands still contain a few trees that were saplings 90 to 150 years ago. Foresters call this generation of trees a "second growth" forest.

Scientists now credit these secondary trees' survival—along with measures begun in the 1970s to protect the bird—for the only truly recovered population of red-cockaded woodpeckers in the country, defined as the presence of at least 500 mating pairs of birds. In recent years, in fact, there have been enough birds in the ANF to allow the Forest Service to relocate some of them to other federal lands, such as Blackwater River State Forest farther west in the Florida Panhandle, to help smaller colonies grow.

In 1991, Fran James' completed her first systematic study of the ANF's red-cockaded woodpecker population. Her research showed that the picture wasn't as rosy as the forest's managers had thought. She found a remarkable disparity in the bird's population between the forest's western and eastern districts, delineated by the Ochlockonee River which roughly bisects the ANF. Compared to the west, home to around 500 mating pairs of woodpeckers, the eastern district contained fewer than 100 pairs, James estimated. She feared that this portion of the population was in serious decline.

The finding triggered a campaign by ANF foresters to seed the eastern district with artificial nesting cavities for the birds. The technique had proven effective in boosting woodpecker populations elsewhere.

The research also led to a project James began in 1996 with a grant from the National Science Foundation and completed last year. Her newest findings confirm that the bird's eastern numbers are still dwindling despite the Forest Service's best efforts to help the bird through artificial nest-building. But now James says she has a far better understanding of why that is, and what it's going to take to reverse the trend.

Her recipe for recovery isn't likely to make everyone happy—not environmentalists, loggers or even all foresters. But she's convinced that it may just be the best answer not only for saving the red-cockaded woodpecker but what's left of the South's entire pinewood ecosystem and the beleaguered timber industry it still supports.

Feather & Fire

A visitor driving down any of the dirt roads that course through the Apalachicola National Forest, or hiking any of its many trails, might glimpse a few larger pine trees that have a white stripe painted around their trunks.

This is how foresters identify trees containing nesting cavities of the red-cockaded woodpecker. Before every planned burn, workers routinely rake around each marked tree and sometimes spray them with fire retardant to make sure they aren't destroyed.

"This is what we're all about here," said Riva Duncan, a timber management assistant with the Forest Service. "We're managing this forest for the survival of this bird, and so far, it's working really well."

Dressed in khaki cover-alls and a hardhat, Duncan lowers her kerosene-filled flambeau into a weedy ditch and watches as the fire, pushed by a feeble breeze, quickly turns the ground before her into an orange-red carpet of flame.

Miles away to the southeast, Fran James walks across squishy soil, pushing through knee-high underbrush, similar to the same woody thicket that Duncan is burning near Bristol, Florida, her headquarters. James points to the ground and calls out the names of plant species as she walks. A volunteer undergrad at her side records her words on a clipboard.

"This is fetterbush. This is gallberry. There's a sweet bay," she says. James is sampling the plants that make up the ground cover in one of 2,200 pine stands in the forest. All around her are longleaf pines that are roughly equal in size—about a foot in diameter— with papery bark tinged black from past fires.

Since at least the early 1960s, "fire ecology" is the term forest managers have used to describe the best tool they have for protecting not only commercially valuable longleaf pines but also the wild animals and plants associated with them. No national forest in the country uses fire as much as the ANF. Foresters there burn an average of 100,000 acres every year, the largest prescribed burning program in the Forest Service. By "prescribed," foresters mean using a detailed formula that takes into account such factors as wind, relative humidity and seasonality before the first torch is lit.

"Without regular fire, the longleaf pine system deteriorates," James says. "It becomes invaded with hardwoods like oaks, hickories and various woody shrubs. At least for now, this burning program has been the secret to the ANF's ecological success."

U.S. forester Riva Duncan puts the torch to acres of underbrush in longleaf stands within the Apalachicola National Forest. Regular burning is foresters' best tool for keeping the forest's ecology in balance.

But early on, James realized that the forest's burning regime had differed historically from west to east—traditionally the western district had been burned more frequently—and the evidence was right underfoot. She found that the forest's ground-cover on the west side of the river had more wiregrass, while the forests on the east side had more woody species, such as gallberry, fetterbush and palmetto.

She and her graduate students soon realized that even though fewer cavity trees were aggregated in the western district, there were not only far more birds, but they were laying more eggs per nest than their counterparts in the east. These birds also didn't have to cover as much territory to find food as the eastern birds did, where woody shrubs predominated ground-cover.

James surmised that both the different burning practices between districts and their different histories of tree harvest played major roles in the birds' nutritional needs, but she didn't know exactly how. To find out, in 1996 she began a collaboration with the Forest Service, with FSU entomologist Walter Tschinkel, a long-time friend and colleague, and soil biologists Paul Hendrix and Robert Potter of the University of Georgia.

The research team set up an experiment that targeted 60 pairs of birds across the entire forest. The territory around each pair was randomly assigned to one of three different fire treatments that were carefully applied for the next six years.

What the team eventually learned was that the woodpeckers that lived in woody ground-cover areas were being short-changed on nutrients such as calcium, an essential nutrient for egg-laying. Just like all plants, woody plants such as gallberry take up calcium from the soil, but they tend to hold onto it and other nutrients longer than herb-like plants such as wiregrass. In areas where woody undergrowth predominates, less calcium gets into the soil, and thus less gets taken up by pine trees. But most importantly for the woodpeckers,—less calcium gets transferred into the birds' favorite diet, a particular species of ant that lives exclusively on pine trees (see page 31).

A woodpecker nestling gets measured, banded and weighed by FSU biology grad student Matt Schrader in June 2001

"We were able to show how calcium, which is critically important to the birds, moves through this ecosystem in pulses," James said. "When the forest is not burned frequently the calcium in the system accumulates in woody shrubs. When it's burned, a pulse of calcium moves into the soil and then gradually moves into the pine trees."

James says the findings proved to her that a regular, conscientiously applied burning program is more important than she'd thought. She saw the need to burn both of the forest's districts more often, in fact burning as often as the ground cover is capable of carrying a fire, which generally is every 18 months or so. Stepped-up burning would mean more herbaceous plants would grow, and thus more calcium would be available not only for the birds' health but for the ecosystem as a whole.

But she also became convinced that the Forest Service needed to open up the forest—to cut more trees, albeit in a specialized way. To some environmentalists, James' call for more logging in the heart of woodpecker territory initially sounded like heresy.

"It's sort of surprising that an ecologist would say you aren't harvesting enough trees," James admits. "But in my view, the Forest Service needs to take quite a few more trees out than they have in the past. We think this would improve things not just for the woodpecker but for the ecosystem as a whole."

The key, James said, is thinning the forest correctly, letting ecology and economics work together for once.

Burn More, Cut More

In 2005, the U.S. Forest Service will celebrate its 100th birthday. For most of its life, the agency has pursued a fairly simple mission—manage the nation's forests for the benefit of water quality and for timber to supply a rapidly growing nation.

In the 1970s, all that changed when Congress directed the agency to manage for "multiple use." Foresters suddenly were responsible for managing the nation's woodlands for recreation, wildlife protection and cattle grazing but still had to worry about timber production and water conservation.

It's long since become a tricky balancing act for foresters who routinely find themselves in the cross-hairs of competing interest groups. To many, letting commercial interests cut trees and protecting wildlife at the same time will never seem compatible management objectives, no matter what science ever says about such.

James knows this all too well, which is one reason that ANF foresters respect her work so much.

Andy Colaninno, until recently the ANF's chief ranger, says that over the years, James' research has helped him determine how many trees can be taken when the agency is planning a timber sale.

"We've known intuitively for a long time that woodpeckers prefer open park-like stands with a regular history of burning," he said. "What this does is allow us to quantify that."

Mac McConnell of Tallahassee, a former Forest Service employee who supports more timber cutting on the Apalachicola National Forest, said James' research replaces what he says was the "non-science" that has guided woodpecker protection. The Forest Service should emphasize more timber-cutting on the Apalachicola to help the birds, said McConnell, who advises Liberty County officials on national forest issues. He said trees need to be cut to improve forest health—not to produce revenue for the federal government or for Liberty County.

"I think they should be following the direction Fran has given them," he said. "They should be harvesting a lot more timber than they are."

Florida Sierra Club chapter representative Judy Hancock of Lake City agrees that more trees could be cut, as long as it is done with more burning. The Sierra Club is against commercial forestry on public lands. But the national group's policy, she said, does allow timber harvesting for environmental good, such as helping the red-cockaded woodpeckers.

"It needs to be in the context of restoring the habitat and recovering the (various) species that depend on the habitat—and not providing revenues," Hancock said. "If we over-thin, there will be fewer trees down the road and we also will have a problem with revenues."

The upshot is that the Forest Service is willing—at times even eager—to cut more trees (primarily smaller trees intended for pulp mills) to help both the bird and the forest, Colaninno said. A big problem now is finding someone to do the work. Thanks to massive imports from Canada and Europe and an oversupply of domestic timber, in recent years the market for American wood products has thudded to the ground.

In the past decade, no fewer than 95 pulp mills have shut their doors in the U.S., including a mill at Port St. Joe, Florida, for more than 60 years the closest pulp mill to the ANF. Florida's Big Bend loggers complain that with low prices and the government's rules on where, when and how they can cut, it's often not worth the trouble to bid on national forest logging work.

Allen Boatright, owner of Boatright Timber Service Inc. in Tallahassee, said he had to move his logging operation on the ANF near Bristol a couple of years ago until after nesting woodpeckers had fledged.

"The red tape, the aggravation, and with the cost and the market conditions like they are, it's not worth my time to mess with (the ANF)," he said. "I'm out here now strictly working with the private sector."

With no end in sight for the depressed pulpwood and timber economy, ANF managers face a dilemma. If the prescription for saving the woodpecker and the health of the forest's longleaf system calls for thinning more trees, as FSU's James says, then loggers are going to have to be given more of an incentive to work in the forest. Which means they will have to be given a green light to cut some of the larger trees for saw timber, the only profitable trees left.

Chuck Hess, an ANF biologist and former graduate student of James', said the key is to structure sales properly so that bids aren't weighted too much toward the less-profitable pulpwood acreage.

"We're going to have to manage for the woodpecker's protection and timber at the same time, and this is the only way we can do that," he said.

James agrees.

"The only way to conserve today's longleaf pine ecosystem is to manage it with prescribed burning and the best way to pay for the fire program is to allow the system to produce sawlogs. What we need is ecological forestry—not a divorce between conservation and forestry—but a marriage."

Rx for a Longleaf Future?

Aside from being too infrequently purged by fire, the biggest problem facing the ANF's remaining longleaf acreage, says James, is that it is aging in place, with too little regeneration. Too few young trees are coming up through the system, and in the long run this spells trouble, James said.

Currently, the forest's longleaf recovery program is largely an even-aged system, she says, with many hundreds of stands reflecting roughly the same year class. These second-growth trees represent the last great crop of seedlings that sprouted while the last old-growth trees were being hauled away in the 1920s. Their sameness of age only goes so far in meeting a prime Forest Service objective, which is to mimic the longleaf forests of yesteryear, James believes.

Old-forests containing trees of all ages ensured a new class of mature trees coming along regularly, plus a more diverse environment conducive to an amazing variety of plants and other wildlife. While the red-cockaded woodpecker gets most of the headlines, the fact is that the ANF is home to numerous other endangered or threatened species, both plants and animals.

James envisions a management scheme that doesn't overlook the plight of the woodpecker but looks, too, at the bigger picture—the long-term sustainability of the forest. She said this picture begins with building a forest with all sizes and ages of pines.

"There's going to have to be forests that are mixtures of trees of all ages. Managing for that objective, like managing for red-cockaded woodpecker habitat, requires more prescribed burning but it also requires opening up the forest to encourage the establishment of seedlings."

To its credit, the Forest Service recognizes the age issue and is taking steps to deal with it. Where feasible, foresters have planted longleaf seedlings—typically a costly and tedious process—and also have created dozens of two-acre-sized clearings. Such sunny openings are designed to support natural regeneration from the dispersal of seeds from falling pine cones.

James said her research suggests this scheme may not be optimal for longleaf regeneration and doesn't always take into account the fickle nature of the longleaf itself. The trees are notoriously sporadic seed producers, and trees in the Florida Panhandle typically wait 15 years between large crops of cones, a phenomenon foresters call a "mast."

Even in a good mast year, if the seeds don't fall on freshly burned ground, chances are they won't develop because the tiny plants are easily choked to death by weeds and shrubs. Plus, longleaf seedlings are easily destroyed by fire. To protect juvenile trees, James and others recommend that burning should be suspended for two years following seedling growth from a mast year.

The two-acre patches now in place also are too big to be as effective for generating young trees as they could be following a mast year, says James. She advocates patches no bigger than a half acre, a size that she says correlates better with the natural dispersal of pine cones cast every few years in the shadow of mature trees.

James' plan calls for more harvest of larger trees than is allowable under current ANF management practices. She recommends a strategy called "thinning from below," a management tool used in forestry for years. It's a selective cutting plan that James says will protect the very old trees and will present more opportunities for regeneration.

The technique calls for systematically taking out trees in a certain size class, namely those small to mid-sized trees from six to 12 inches in diameter. This would guarantee the production of more 90-year (and older) trees, which would mean that eventually foresters would no longer need to install artificial nesting cavities for the woodpecker, James said.

It would also mean that eventually, an all-age forest would emerge, and a crop of valuable timber-sized trees would always be on hand for the market. In short, the Forest Service could see a sustainable future in the return of one of the most desirable ecosystems ever known.

James hopes her research and that of others can help public agencies and other forest landowners maintain forests that are more sustainable and better for the environment. She said it's not realistic to think that old-growth forests will ever return. But she envisions a forest with some trees over 100 years old, some younger trees and some seedlings growing in patches where the canopy has been opened by periodic timber harvesting.

Unless current longleaf sawtimber stands are managed to promote regeneration they will continue to mature without the internal structure needed for long-term sustainability," James said. "This is true for all longleaf forests today, not just those with red-cockaded woodpeckers."

Best Laid Plans & Politics

As James' blueprint for longleaf management sits in Washington awaiting favor, an unforeseen political development potentially threatens to unravel not only her work but that of the ANF as well.

Last year, a Republican-backed bill aimed at changing the way the 1973 Endangered Species Act is implemented passed a House panel. Backers say the bill would not alter the status of any species already protected by the act, but simply would call for "sound science" in deciding how to protect other species and habitat, plus a peer review process to study any recovery plans on the table. Conservation groups described the measure as an attempt to gut the law itself and make it harder to recover species facing extinction.

Debate, falling along party lines, kept the bill bottled up until Congress adjourned last fall. What worries conservationists is that since January, a new sheriff is in town—a Republican-controlled Congress. With sentiment against federal conservation laws in general running high among business groups nationwide, some environmental groups fear for the worst.

Without the law, of course, the issue of the red-cockaded woodpecker would never have arisen and consequently, protecting what's left of longleaf forests on federal lands most likely would never have become a national priority.

Following a study last year, the Forest Service concluded that the South's pine forestry is a vital national resource that is sustainable, meaning that it can be expected to produce valuable timber products indefinitely. James offered a final cautionary note about the Forest Service's optimistic forecast.

"This study does not address the issue of our research, which is whether today's second-growth longleaf pine stands, which are of great ecological importance, are likely to persist with today's system of management, even on federal land," she said.

"We say they will not persist unless managers stress the need for more burning and a major program of thinning to encourage regeneration.

"The bottom line is, you can do a lot for the red-cockaded woodpecker, and still not do enough to solve the whole ecosystem problem."