Endangered woodpeckers persist, but still struggle, on private land

January 24, 2018, American Ornithological Society

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started the Safe Harbor program in North Carolina in 1995 to reduce conflict between landowners and conservation officials and to encourage private landowners to take steps to benefit endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers on their land. The program has successfully reduced conflict over conservation and reduced the abandonment of nest clusters, but a new study from The Condor: Ornithological Applications shows that while the program may have raised landowners' awareness of and tolerance for their feathered neighbors, it has largely failed to improve breeding success of birds on private lands.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Jennifer Smith and her colleagues compared Red-cockaded Woodpeckers' breeding success on Safe Harbor properties before and after enrollment with that on control properties, monitoring a total of 55 breeding clusters in the North Carolina Sandhills between 1980 and 2014. Nest cluster abandonment increased on control properties while remaining constant and negligible on Safe Harbor properties, but other measures of breeding success such as clutch size, nest failure rates, and fledging success were unaffected by Safe Harbor habitat management efforts. These results suggest that the Safe Harbor program often failed to maintain or increase high-quality foraging habitat for the birds.

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