- [Lauren] Today, we are in the beautiful Sandhills Gamelands.

We are here to basically find some red-cockaded woodpeckers.

So, we call this device a peeper pole, and what it does is that we have a camera up here.

This pole extends until it reaches the cavity Once we have it in there, it will allow us to see what is inside.

- [Narrator] Lauren is part of an extensive team of researchers monitoring the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker in the Sandhills of North Carolina.

- So, I see three nestlings.

Around day 20, I'll be able to come back and specifically see how many have a crown patch or not, and that will tell me how many males and how many females I have.

- [Narrator] The data Lauren collects on this nest and others will be added to one of the longest ongoing vertebrate studies on the planet.

In the early 1970s the red-cockaded woodpecker was listed as a federally endangered species.

- When monitoring began in 1980 population levels in the Sandhills were relatively low.

- [Narrator] Red-cockaded woodpeckers are in the Sandhills because of the longleaf pine forests.

- [Brady] Red-cockaded woodpeckers are a unique species in that they excavate their cavities in live old pine trees.

- [Lauren] Specifically, the longleaf pine is one of the sappiest pine trees out there, and that's great for the RCW because they use the sap as a defense mechanism.

They will drill resin wells into these trees, which will flow with sap.

Their biggest predator is the black rat snake.

What the rat snake will do is it will try to climb the pine tree, it will get sticky with sap, it will fall to the ground, and it will be sappy for a few days.

- [Narrator] To gather data about red-cockaded woodpecker nesting success Lauren also climbs these sappy trees, fortunately with the help of ladders and some other specialized equipment that helps her take baby birds out of the nest to add some fancy jewelry to their legs.

- [Lauren] So, we have our pullers.

Helps us pull out the nestlings.

Hello.

[bird trilling] Hello.

Hi hi hi.

So, once we pull the nestlings, we wanna check in the cavity to make sure that we got them all, to see also if there are any eggs present.

Come back down the tree, band the chicks.

So, each group of birds has a specific band combo.

We call it a glam combo.

So, they have two bands, an aluminum band and a colored band, on their right leg, and they have three bands on their left leg.

Once we band them, we want to get a weight on them.

So, we put them in a little weight bag, get a weight.

Then, once we do all that, we climb back up the tree, put the chicks back in.

We try to do it butt-first, and we try to do it with the heaviest chick first because if we have a lighter chick, that way, they might get you know, the next bug that's coming in.

We take our mirror and our light back out.

Put it back in, make sure that they're all down there safe and sound, and we climb back down the tree.

- [Narrator] The colorful bands stay on the birds as they grow and allow researchers to follow specific birds as they leave the nest, or fledge.

They use high=powered scopes to spot the tiny leg bands.

- [Brady] Here they come.

Incoming.

That one's aluminum again.

Big babies.

Oh.

There's number two.

That was dark green on the right.

- [Lauren] So, each cluster has their very own band combo, that's how we tell them apart, and each individual has a different color band on either leg.

- Just two adults so far.

- So far.

Looks like the third is aluminum, those are red.

- [Brady] Cool.

- [Lauren] So we've counted three adults here so far.

- [Narrator] There are more than just one pair of adults around this nest because red-cockaded woodpeckers are cooperative breeders.

- [Lauren] So, they have a very unique social system.

They live in these family groups which are made up of a breeder male, a breeder female, and what we call helpers.

- [Narrator] Helpers are usually male, and they assist with everything from incubating the eggs to defending the territory, all in the hope that they might one day inherit it and have their own nest.

For a longleaf pine tree to be the right size for a red-cockaded woodpecker nest, typically it needs to be about a hundred years old, which can be hard to find.

- [Brady] Historically, through logging up until the beginning of the 1900s, almost the entire Southeast was clearcut for railroad, boat making, any number of things, turpentine.

So now we're, say, a hundred years post that, that main clearing in the Southeast, we're getting a lot of trees that are coming into perfect age and internal structure where the birds can make their own natural cavities.

To make a natural cavity these birds have to excavate through the bark, a thin layer of cambium, the sapwood, and then excavate a cavity that's maybe three inches around by seven inches deep in the heartwood of the tree, and that can take anywhere from 1 to 12 years to make one cavity.

- [Narrator] One solution to help populations grow more quickly: artificial nesting cavities.

- This is an artificial cavity.

It's one of the most important tools we have for bridging the gap between a younger forest that may have bigger trees and more of an old growth state where the birds can create their own cavity.

This is installed in a rather large tree with a chainsaw, and the birds will take to these almost immediately.

I've put them in before and had them use them that same night.

They've been a crucial tool for getting us to this point in our recovery journey.

- [Narrator] And it's an ongoing journey, although populations have improved significantly since the 1970s.

- [Brady] Since then, we've had really great conservation successes by growing the populations where we can do prescribed fire and artificial cavity work, but they are what's considered a conservation-reliant species, in that all the work that we're doing is gonna need to continue to happen going into the future.

- [Narrator] Fire maintains longleaf pine ecosystems by clearing out the understory.

Unique species in this forest, like this wiregrass, are specially adapted to rebound quickly after a fire.

As work continues to be done to maintain their habitat, researchers like Lauren are starting to ask questions about how these birds will adapt to a changing climate.

- [Lauren] Climate change research on the RCW is just sort of ramping up.

There have been studies that have seen that there is a climate-induced shift in nesting earlier.

With this climate-induced shift we are seeing this increase in hatching failures and brood reduction.

- [Narrator] Brood reduction means less chicks survive from each nest.

Based on the trends they're seeing further south, researchers are worried populations in the Sandhills will be impacted next.

- [Lauren] It all goes back to the pine trees.

They have to go where the living pine trees are.

Looking at that and where the climate change is impacting them, they sort of kinda don't have a choice because this is their home.

They're endemic to this ecosystem.

We just have to keep doing what we're doing with the monitoring and the management and just keeping up the ecosystem of these birds.