Summer 2005

A Resin for Being

by Frank Stephenson

A 4-foot long rat snake, its shiny gray coils tightened around a perch 35 feet up a shortleaf pine, lifts its head towards a hole further up the trunk. The snake flicks its tongue to "smell" its prey--redcockaded woodpecker nestlings, still sound asleep, oblivious to the danger lurking just below them.

But the tiny birds aren't all the snake detects. A smear of fresh pine resin lies between the snake and its prey. Arching its body out from the tree to avoid the resin, the snake falls to the ground and slithers off.

Scenes like this are played out every day in the eternal struggle of predator vs. prey. But in this case, the prey--the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker--is able to use an innate, almost chemical knowledge of its primary habitat to thwart its foe. The birds bet their survival on the ability to find pine trees that can produce an adequate supply of resin to block rat snakes from raiding their nests and destroying their communities.

It wasn't until the late 1970s, after the bird rose to offi cial endangered status, that scientists began to fully appreciate this and other curious facts about the red-cockaded woodpecker. Taken for granted for centuries--its population once numbering into the untold millions across the southern Coastal Plains--in the 1960s, the bird was found to be clinging to existence in highly scattered groups living mainly in the remnants of old-growth longleaf pine forests from North Carolina to Texas. Today, less than 13,000 red-cockaded woodpeckers are thought to exist. The species' survival remains a preeminent management priority for the USDA Forest Service, and a perpetual source of intrigue for people like Richard Conner.(...continued...)