The Institute for Bird Populations

Transcription

To a lot of people fire may seem like an agent of ecological destruction, but there are actually many plants and animal species that are adapted to living in recently burned areas. And the black-backed woodpecker is sort of the poster child of these species. Fires are a natural part of the ecosystem and black-backed woodpeckers are found in higher abundances in burned forests. They have been found in green forests, unburned forests, but they definitely like the burned forests and it’s related to prey base. Black-backed woodpecker’s primary food source are the grubs or the larval stage of wood-boring beetles. And wood boring beetles colonize recently burned areas in huge numbers and provide an amazing food source for black-backed woodpeckers. Black-backed woodpeckers have some adaptations that allow them to bang their head against hard wood thousands of times a day. And they do it to dig out wood boring beetle larvae, they also do it to communicate with one another, and lastly they do it to excavate their nests.  Woodpeckers are primary cavity nesters. Each year they create their own cavity and the actual building of that hole is part of the mating ritual. And so they have to create a new hole each year. The old cavities are used by other species - secondary cavity nesters- that cannot make their own cavities. For example: song birds, flicker, western bluebird, a number of squirrel species, martin … so it’s a really important creator of habitat components for other species as well. Here in the Sierra Nevada we started a partnership study with the Institute of Bird Populations, trying to get some detailed information on how they’re using the landscape. This is the first time that black-backed woodpeckers have been radio-tagged in California. This is very exciting. One of the purposes of our research on black-backed woodpeckers is to quantify how much area or how many standing dead trees, or snags as we call them, a given pair of black-backed woodpeckers actually needs in order to reproduce successfully. We’ve been working on this part of the study for three seasons and we’re almost finished.  We have a real good picture now of the habitat that the black-backed woodpeckers are selecting. And at the end of the season we’re going to provide the Forest Service with some really specific recommendations about which patches of burned forests are most important to retain on the landscape for the woodpeckers. We can’t monitor all the species. We try to monitor habitats and habitat trends and then we select a handful of species to monitor that will represent other species. We really are professionals. And we have a lot of good information, but we don’t know it all. In fact no one knows it all, there’s a lot of unknowns out there especially with regard to changing environments and climate change and other stressors. So restoration is very complicated. Fires burning in areas where people live and play and work is a problem, but fires burn across large areas and most of the areas that they burn in California actually aren’t heavily used by people. In addition, even though we are seeing an increase in really big, high severity fires in California, high severity burned areas still covers only a very small percentage of the landscape as a whole. And we have to keep that in mind when we’re managing habitat for black-backed woodpeckers because there really isn’t that much of it. So what that means is that in some cases, an important part of restoring is actually “leaving be”. That to the extent that we can preserve as much of that as possible for black-backed woodpeckers and the other species that actually depend on that habitat, we’ll be doing right by those species. It’s not easy. It’s complicated. And it’s really complicated when you have species like the black-backed woodpeckers which seem to be benefiting from these large fire areas but other species are losing habitat. For example: spotted owl and martin and fisher which need closed canopy, mature forest. They don’t do well when it’s all burned up. You’ve got a lot of different species, a lot of different habitat needs. So having that variation on the landscape is our objective and our challenge. Recognizing that fires is a natural part of our system and an important part of them, we are trying to keep the vegetation types and the species that live on our lands there. And for the most species we’re managing the habitat, that’s our goal and restoring the habitat over the long term. It’s not simple, but that’s what we do We’re a multi-use agency and we always have to balance a lot of different things on a particular landscape. It’s a big job out there, but we can work together. We can work with our partners and make some progress. So it’s exciting.