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Fort Bragg's Woodpeckers
Soldiers, Wildlife Find Common Ground in North Carolina
 Listen to Christopher Joyce's report.
Listen to a red-cockaded woodpecker.
The red-cockaded woodpecker gets its name from a small red patch on the side of its head, just barely visible on the bird on the right.
Photo: Texas Parks & Wildlife © 2002, Frank Aquilar
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Soldiers learn everything from digging foxhills to jumping from planes at Fort Bragg.
Photo: Fort Bragg/U.S. Army
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These seven-day-old nestlings were tagged to help researchers track the woodpeckers around Fort Bragg.
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Susan Ladd
Miller
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Army environmental intern Kevin Lapp extends a periscope 20 feet up to peer inside an RCW's nest cavity.
Photo: Christopher Joyce, NPR News
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Rick Studenmund, land manager for The Nature Conservancy in North Carolina's Sandhills region.
Photo: Christopher Joyce, NPR News
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May 9, 2002 -- The Pentagon and its supporters in Congress are trying to win the right to violate environmental laws on military reservations. They say rules that protect migrating birds and endangered species cripple their ability to train soldiers in real-life settings.
In North Carolina, however, the people who run the Army's biggest military reservation have found that the endangered species laws actually help them do their job. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports for Morning Edition.
More U.S. soldiers hone their weapons skills at Fort Bragg than anywhere else. Soldiers there train with rifles, howitzers, tanks and helicopters -- and they need considerable space to accommodate such big-equipment drills.
Fort Bragg has the space -- 161,000 acres, mostly long-leaf pine forests and fields. But the rest of the world is slowly closing in. Strip malls, fast-food restaurants and housing developments have grown around the boundary like moss. The fort's neighbors complain about the smoke and noise from ammunition and helicopters. During one parachute drill, a soldier actually landed in someone's swimming pool.
Creeping sprawl -- the Army calls it encroachment -- has added an extra challenge to training. To make matters more difficult, wildlife is taking refuge inside the fort -- including the red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird protected by the Endangered Species Act. The Army started to worry that it would have to curtail live-fire training and even things as basic as digging foxholes to protect the bird.
But, in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy, the Army has capitalized on the woodpecker's plight to forge a novel solution to encroachment -- and to the loss of the woodpecker's habitat.
They've come up with about $7 million each for a program called the Private Lands Initiative. The Conservancy is using the money and the Endangered Species Act to buy whatever's left of the undeveloped land around Fort Bragg. The long-leaf pine forests are then preserved as woodpecker habitat -- and also serve as a buffer between the fort and development. The Army can train soldiers there, minus the live fire. It's all in the name of the woodpecker, or as the Army likes to call it, the RCW.
It took years for the Army and environmentalists to forge the Private Lands Initiative. While some in the Pentagon and Congress remain skeptical of environmental laws, those on the scene at Fort Bragg say that wildlife and soldiers in training can coexist.
In Depth
 Read more about another woodpecker in the news, the fabled ivory-bill. Christopher Joyce reports for Radio Expeditions.
Browse for more NPR stories about woodpeckers.
Other Resources
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Fort Bragg on the Web
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The Nature Conservancy
Read more about the RCW at:
• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service/North Carolina
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters
• Pineywoods Wildlife Management
• Texas Parks & Wildlife
• National Wildlife Federation
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