Carolina Sandhills NWR wildlife biologist Laura Housh, using a peeper scope to view chicks inside a red-cockaded woodpecker cavity nest


Excerpt from "Translocation"


5:30 p.m., September 29, and I was standing outside the Carolina Sandhills’ NWR office next to wildlife biologist Laura Housh, forester Clay Ware and 8 others, including Neal Humke and Brian Watts of The Nature Conservancy, who had driven down from Piney Grove Plantation in Virginia for the occasion--an attempt to translocate 6 red-cockaded woodpeckers to their refuge . . .

At dusk, each RCW would bed down in its own cavity, cozily ignorant of the US Fish and Wildlife Red-Cockaded Recovery Act of 1985 which mandated translocation, chirpilly unaware that with nightfall it might be stalked, startled from its sleep, frightened from its nest, netted, bagged, boxed and shipped to become part of a different colony in a different state and thereby participate in a gambit for its species’ survival. The birds would be stressed. Laura was stressed, too, although I would not have known it if she had not hinted to me how much depended on this day . . .

As we approached, Laura was kneeling at the trunk of the cavity tree, holding the frightened bird. “The toes of one of its feet are snagged in the net,” she said. Neal held a flashlight in one hand and the data sheet in the other as Laura noted the colored bands on the free leg--“white, white, mauve.” She then asked Neal to grasp the bird so that she could free its other leg and read the number of the aluminum band. This was a dramatic moment. Not only might the bird escape as it changed hands, it was also the first time that Neal would hold one of the endangered birds . . .

Inside each box, the birds were pecking loudly now like miners trapped in black caves testing the walls with pickaxes for the best routes of escape, or like prisoners in solitary cells tapping messages in morse code to other inmates, planning their breakout--”Where are we now, how many were caught, how do we get free?” . . .

The result of the hunt: 3 Homo sapiens motoring off in the night with 2 male and 3 female Picoides borealis in an effort to save one of the most resourceful and feisty little avians on the planet.