Ep. 459: Backwoods University – Troops and Wildlife

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wild life, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to ONEX Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickele, and today is such a special day, Memorial Day, a day to honor, a day to mourn, and to show gratitude for the military personnel who have paid the ultimate sacrifice serving this country, a day that’s level of importance simply cannot be overstated. And really, on a personal note here, before we even get into today’s episode, I just want to say thank you to any military service men or women who might be listening to this show. I just want you to know that I appreciate you. We all do. And since today is such an important day, I thought it was only fitting that we give it a very special episode now. Is previously stated, in this show, we talk about wild things and wild places and people who dedicate their lives to conserving those things. Well, in this episode, we’re going to hear we are four different stories of our very own US military when they were directly involved with wildlife conservation. Man this military brus they serve this country selflessly. They keep us protected, and they can serve our wildlife. They can do anything, and we sure appreciate it. Let’s dive into these stories. Story number one, the woodpecker War. I want to talk to you about one of the strangest, most improbable conservation stories in the history of this country. Really, and here’s the thing. It happened on a military base, a live fire training ground, one of the busiest army installations in the world. And the whole thing started because of a small bird. I want you to picture Fort Bragg now they call it Fort Liberty, sitting in the North Carolina sandhills near Fayetteville, one hundred and sixty seven thousand acres of mostly forested land, fifty thousand active duty soldiers, artillery going off across the woods, trace a rounds lighting up the tree lines at night, paratroopers coming down into the clearings. It is, in every sense of the word, a place where things get torn up. And yet almost entirely by accident, Fort Bragg had become one of the last refuges on earth for a bird that was slipping away from us, the red cockaded woodpecker. Now here’s what you need to understand about this bird. If you’re gonna understand this story, which is important, the red cacaded woodpecker has what I would call one of the most demanding real estate requirements in the entire avian world. They almost solely nest in living long leaf pine trees, and not just any long leaf pine, only trees that are older than about eighty years whose heartwood has been softened by a very specific fungus called red heart disease. Carving out a cavity in the living wood can take this bird anywhere from one to ten years. So just think about that for a second. One to ten years just to build a nest. And it’s a cooperative breeder too, meaning that the young birds come back from previous years and stick around to help their parents raise the next generation. There’s a lot going on with this bird, my friends. But here’s the problem. The long leaf pine ecosystem that once blanket at one hundred million acres of the American southeast, stretching from New Jersey all the way down to Florida to Texas. That ecosystem is all but gone, farmed over, subdivided almost to nothing by the mid twentieth century. And when the trees went the woodpecker went with it. By nineteen ninety five, what had once been somewhere around one point six million breeding groups before nineteen ten was down to fewer than four thousand. That’s a staggering decrease. That’s a species that’s essentially on its way out. Fort Bragg had survived all of that, almost entirely because the Army had claimed the land in nineteen eighteen and never let development touch the majority of it. Hines had grown old. And here’s the part that really gets to me. The artillery had accidentally been setting fires for decades, tracer arounds from machine guns shells landing in the forest. They were starting low grade fires that burned through the understory and kept it open. And you know what long leaf pines need to thrive, fire, regular prescribed fire or natural fire. The army had unknowingly been doing exactly what a land manager would do on purpose, and the birds figured it out before anyone else did. Then, in the year nineteen ninety things got real in a hurry, US Fish and Wildlife issued what is called a jeopardy opinion, a formal finding that the armist training activities were threatening the continued existence of the red cockaded woodpecker, and to understand what that means in practical terms, shooting ranges got closed down. Training areas had to be completely redesigned. Strict limits were placed on how close vehicles and soldiers could operate near parked cavity trees. Some units were temporarily shipped out of the state just to be able to train properly. A Senator named Jesse Helms from North Carolina actually called on Congress to try and exempt Fort Bragg from the Endangered Species Act altogether, and the Army was seriously considering going this route. A man named Mike Lynch was on the leadership team at Fort Bragg at the time, overseeing the training areas. He described the circumstances pretty plainly. He said, we got a.

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Speaker 2: Jeopardy opinion from Fish and Wildlife, which basically said that all of our military training had to come to a halt. The relationship between the Army and the conservation community was, to put it kindly, not great. But after several meetings between the two groups, something started to happen. The Army started walking the biologists through how soldiers and vehicles actually moved through the forest during training, and the biologists started explaining in real detail what the woodpecker actually needed to survive, and both sides started slowly realizing that they were not as opposed as they had assumed, because those fires, the ones the Army had been setting by accident all along, were creating the exact conditions that the needed.

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Speaker 1: That the woods needed, The military was maintaining habitat that hadn’t existed anywhere else in the landscape for decades. That was a huge turning point. The Army partnered with the Nature Conservancy in the mid nineteen nineties, and together they launched what they called the Private Lands Initiative. They started buying parcels of land surrounding the base from willing sellers, creating forested corridors that would connect Fort Bragg’s woodpecker population to another large population at Camp McCall, a separate Army installation about seventy thousand acres away. A red cockaded woodpecker can’t cross a treeless gap much wider than about two hundred meters before it gives up, so the land that they were buying from was not random. It was strategic, stitching the habitat back together gap by gap, and the birds could move and inter breed and survive long term, hopefully. The partnership spent up about twelve million dollars on that effort over a decade. Seven million of that came from the Army itself. The results were something that nobody had predicted. Fort Bragg had entered the nineteen nine with only a few hundred woodpecker breeding pairs. The recovery goal set by Fish and Wildlife was five hundred pairs. They hit that goal five years ahead of schedule, five years early. Today there are somewhere between eighteen and nineteen thousand individual red cockaded woodpeckers, and the Fort Bragg population is considered to be biologically recovered. In January of two thousand and nine, more than three thousand, one hundred acres of previously restricted training land were reopened because the bird no longer needed the protection. And the story doesn’t stop at Fort Bragg. The model they built there got replicated across the country. Fort Benning and Georgia Eggland Air Force Base in Florida, just to name a few. The Pentagon spent over a billion dollars on similar conservation partnerships across thirty different states. The long leaf pine ecosystem has grown back to over five million acres. There was one Fort Bragg official that summed it up as well as anyone could. They said, we’re no longer adversaries. It’s really just about managing the training lands properly. If Fort Bragg does that, the red cockaded woodpecker is going to be just fired. Just think about this, a bird the size of your fist, fighting a bureaucratic battle that most people have never heard of, quietly changing how the entire US military thinks about the land it sits on. That’s our first story, my friends, and it’s a good one, but we’re just getting started. Story number two, the Battlefield Bird Sanctuary. Now, for this story, we’re going to go a long way from North Carolina out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to three tiny coral islands that most people associate with one of the most decisive naval battles in American history, because I want to talk about what happened to those islands after the battle was over. And what happened is something that I think represents one of the most remarkable wildlife conservation stories that we’ve seen. Midway of tall if you never looked at a map and found it. The remoteness of this place it’s kind of hard to fully grasp. It sits at the far northwestern tip of the Hawaiian Archipelago, roughly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so remote that it wasn’t mapped by a western sailor until eighteen fifty nine, so remote that it’s not technically part of the state of Hawaii, claimed separately for the United States in the year eighteen fifty six and in federal hands ever since. Three small coral islands, about one thousand, five hundred acres of land in total, surrounded by five hundred and eighty thousand acres of submerged reef and open ocean. Geologically, it’s one of the oldest island formations in the entire Hawaiian chain, a volcanic remnant eroding into the sea for twenty eight million years. The ancient Hawaiians had a name for it. They caught it Pihamanu, which meant the loud den of birds. They named it after what they heard when they first got there. If that tells you something about what’s always been there, Midway’s modern history goes back to nineteen oh three, when Teddy Roosevelt placed it under naval control the same time period that he was building the foundation of what would become the National Park System. The first permanent residents were a commercial Pacific Cable company managing the Transoceanic telegraph cable that ran through it. Pan American Airways built a refueling base before its Pacific Clipper seaplanes in nineteen thirty five, And then came December seventh, nineteen forty one, when a Japanese raiding party attacked Midway on the same day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Six months later came the battle itself. Over three days in June of nineteen forty two, American forces outmaneuvered a Japanese fleet that had them badly outnumbered and outgunned. American dive bombers sank four Japanese fleet carriers, irreplaceable ships crewed by irreplaceable airmen, and shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in a way that it never recovered from. Most military historians consider it to be a turning point of the entire Pacific War, and for the next fifty years after that, Midway House an active naval facility capable of supporting more than five thousand residents, buildings, bunkers, runways, torpedo shops, barracks, covering two of the three islands the Navy left in nineteen ninety three. In nineteen ninety six, Midway became a National Wildlife Refuge, and in two thousand it was formerly designated in the Battle of Midway National Memorial. Two things, a major military shrine and one of the most important seabird colonies on the planet now coexist on the same ground. Today, Midway hosts somewhere around three million individual birds from twenty one breeding species. Let’s think about this for a second. Three million birds twenty one different species on fifteen hundred acres of land. That is some serious biodiversity, my friends. The island also hosts green sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals, spinner dolphins, and an unusually high city of endemic reef fish. By the end of November each year, nearly every patch of available land on those islands is occupied by a nesting albatross pair. The Hawaiians named this place well the den of Birds. Indeed, now, before we wrap this story up, I have to tell you about wisdom, not wisdom the character trait, wisdom the bird because Wisdom is one of the most remarkable individual animals that you will ever learn about. She’s an albatross who was first banded by a biologist named Chandler Robbins back in nineteen fifty six. She is, as of right now, at least seventy four years old. She’s outlived the man that banded her, and she’s outlived most of the men who fought at Midway. Scientists estimate she’s flown somewhere around three point five million miles in her lifetime. That’s insane. She’s raised somewhere between thirty and thirty five chicks that survived to Fledge, and she comes back to the same nest site on the sand island every November. Crazy. But the story I want to close this one with involves a man, not a bird, a marine sergeant named Edgar Fox, who fought at the Battle of Midway as a young man. In June of twenty twelve, he went back for the seventy year anniversary, and he walked those islands, passed the bunkers, pasted the rusting machinery of war, and everywhere he looked he saw birds. He saw albatross nesting in the shell craters, shuffling along the old runways, filling the sky in every direction. He looked at all of it, and he’s quoted in saying maybe it’s a symbol of an era of peace. He kept coming back year after year until he passed away in twenty twenty four, and every year he would make note that the refuge was a great monument to the people that passed here, and that he couldn’t think of a better way for it to be used. And I can’t think of a better way to wrap this story up than that. Now on to the next one, story number three, the bombing Range that Saved the Fox. This one might be the most dramatic of the bunch, and I mean that it comes from a small island off the coast of southern California and involves foxes, goats, shrikes, and the US Navy seals. That’s quite a plethora, if you ask me, and one of the fastest wildlife recoveries in the history of the Endangered Species Act. So buckle up. San Clemente Island sits about sixty eight miles southwest of San Diego, the southernmost of the eight California Channel Islands, A long volcanic ridge that looks from the water like a place that means business. The Navy has owned it entirely since the late nineteen thirties, and they use it quite a bit missile tests, amphibious landings, live fire exercises, carrier air wing practice, seal team training, one of the most strategically important training grounds in the entire Pacific Fleet, running around the clock, and it is also quietly the site of one of the most dramatic ecological turnarounds that we’ve seen in America’s conservation history. Before we can fully appreciate what happened here, we need to understand what this island looked like before the Navy started paying attention to it, because honestly, it’s not a pretty picture. Before the Navy acquired San Clemente, ranchers ran livestock on it for decades, feral goats, several thousand of them, in fact, over twenty thousand of them at one point had stripped the native vegetation down to bare hill sites. Now, if you’re unaware of what goats can do to a landscape, that basically can turn it into a moonscape. The native plants had evolved on that island found literally nowhere else on Earth, were gone from huge portions of their range. The animals that depended on those plants followed right along. By the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, San Clemente Island held one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in California, and almost everything on that list was going in the wrong direction. The San Clemente Island fox, which is a relatively small subspecies of fox, was down to roughly three hundred individuals at its lowest point. The San Clemente bell sparrow had thirty four known adults in nineteen eighty four. The San Clemente loggerhead shrike, a predatory songbird that impels its prey on thorns like a little butcher. Pretty cool if you ask me, had fallen to as few as fourteen birds between nineteen eighty two and nineteen ninety eight. Certain plants existed in single digits. In fact, there was one species called a bush mollow that was known from exactly one individual plant. If I’m trying to paint the picture here to show that the species, the native species on this small island were suffering, now here’s where the story gets complicated in a way. I don’t think most people have heard about. The fox was eating shrike eggs and nestlings, contributing to the shrike’s decline, and the shrike had a federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. So for a period in the nineteen nineties, the Navy was actually trapping and killing foxes to protect the shrike conservation, essentially eating itself. A legally defensible decision that was nevertheless a painful one, and the public outcry was intense and immediate. The Navy eventually shifted to far more nuanced strategies, such as temporarily relocating foxes during shrike nesting season and installing electric fencing around strike nest sites, even putting shot collars on foxes to condition them away from shrike habitat. They were trying to solve a problem that didn’t have a clean answer. But here’s the foundational fix, the one that made everything else possible. The goats, remember those while Starting in the late nineteen seventies and continuing for twenty years, the Navy systematically removed every feral goat from San Clemente Island. The last one came off in nineteen ninety one, and when they finished the land responded quite quickly. Native shrubs that had been browsed and nubs began to return, Grasses came back, The endemic plants that had been pushed to the fringes started reclaiming terrain that they hadn’t occupied in decades. The island began to return to its original form. Over the following decades, the Navy and the Fish and Wildlife built one of the more comprehensive multi species recovery programs that you could ever read about. Scientists and military planners learned to coordinate their schedules around each other. Filled surveys happened between live fire exercises, conservation, and national security coexisting on the same piece of ground. Now that’s pretty dang cool. In January of twenty twenty three, the Navy and Fish and Wildlife announced together that the five San Clemente Island species were fully recovered and no longer needed ESA protection. The bell sparrow, which we mentioned earlier, had climbed from thirty four individuals to somewhere between four thousand and eight thousand birds. The island fox, and several other plants had been added to the recovered list in prior years as well. The Island fox recovery has been called the fastest mammal recovery in the history of the Endangered Species Act, listed and delisted in twelve years time. That’s lightning quick. And I bet you if you were to stand in that Eye Island in nineteen eighty, nobody would have ever thought that any of that was possible. So I always remember, in the world of conservation, no matter how bleak it may look, all hope is never lost. But I think we have time for one more story before we wrap this up, so let’s get into it. Story number four Bombs, Gopher tortoises and the Accidental Refuge. For the last story, I want us to zoom out a little bit because I think when you look at everything that we talked about on today’s episode, there’s a bigger picture worth analyzing for a minute. And to get there, I want to take you to a place in coastal Georgia called the Townsend Bombing Range, because what’s happening there is one of the clearest examples I know of a reality that I think is one of the most underappreciated things going on in conservation in this country. Right now, About fifty miles inland from the Georgia Coast, near a town called jess there’s a stretch of land where Marine F eighteens, A ten Ward Hoogs, and Apache helicopters regularly drop one thousand pound bombs and rake the ground with heavy caliber machine gun fire. A lot going on. It’s training facility designed to simulate some of the most violent conditions that modern aerial warfare produces, and it also happens to be for reasons. I’m about to walk through one of the better places left in the Southeastern United States for the gopher tortoise. Now, if you’re from the South, if you spend any time in the woods, especially if you’re a turkey hunter, you probably know what a gopher tortoise is. They move slow, which isn’t surprising because they’re a tortoise. They dig burrows, which is pretty cool. You should google a picture one and take a look at their front feet because they’re pretty sweet and they can live for eighty to ninety years, longer than most people. These burrows that they dig can go up to forty feet into the ground and maintain a stable temperature. And here’s the detail I always like to focus on about this animal. More than three hundred and fifty other speed use these gopher tortoise burrows, the Eastern Indigo snake, the gopher frog, the Florida mouse. There’s even been studies showing that bob white quail will use these burrows to shelter under You take the gopher tortoise out, and the whole community of species goes along with it. That’s what a keystone species looks like in practice. But the gopher tortoise has been in some serious trouble for quite some time now, unfortunately, losing grounds to development, agriculture, and fire suppression across its entire range. It’s currently a candidate for federal listing, is threatened declining in almost every landscape where humans have built things or put out fires. It’s declining almost everywhere except and here comes that pattern again, the bombing range, because the towns and burns regularly. Bombs and cannon fires start fires that sweep through the long leaf pine understory and keep it open. And now here’s what I really want to hold on to, because this is the bigger picture that we’ve been focusing on this entire time. The Department of Defense manages a prixmly twenty seven million acres of land. In the United States, most of the major military bases were established in the early to mid twentieth century, before the post war development way have consumed enormous stretches of the American landscape. And because those lands got locked up early, because they’ve been largely off limits to commercial development, farming, drainage for sixty seventy eighty years, they have inadvertently preserved ecosystems that simply don’t exist at scale anywhere else. Military bases in this country have a higher density of threatened and endangered plants and animals than any other category of federal land. Think about that. That is a crazy fact. Higher than the National parks, even higher than the National forest. The Department of Defense manages habitat for over five hundred federally listed species. That is a crazy, staggering number, my friends. The mechanism is almost absurdly simple. You can’t build a subdivision on a live fire range, you can’t drain wetlands inside a restricted military installation, and you can’t log timber out of a place where soldiers are training with live ammunition. The same exclusion that the military imposes for reasons of operational security produces, as a side effect, one of the most comprehensive networks of de facto wildlife refuges in the entire American country. The gopher tortoise plytting its way across the town’s an impact zone, navigating bombs and unexploded shells. It’s not there by happenstance. It’s not there because somebody planned it. It’s there because the land around it never turned into a parking lot. And it’s there because the bombing range is the last long leaf forest that it’s got. And that brings me back to everything we’ve covered today. The red cockaded woodpecker, the island of birds, the foxes, and all the other critters on San Clemente Island, the gopher tortoise, The partnership that has evolved between the conservation community and our American military, whose core purpose really has nothing to do with wildlife, has turned out to be one of the most consequential conservation arrangements in American history. Pretty cool, right, And the funny thing is it’s not like this was planned. Nobody sat down in a room and designed it. It just happened because the land was there and the need was real, and the people on both sides chose to work together instead of against each other, and every time they did, something came back from the edge of disaster and good things happened. I think there’s a lot to be learned from that, I really do. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Greece in this country life. It means a whole lot to all of us, and I want to give a special thank you on this Memorial Day episode to everyone who has served or is currently serving in the Armed forces. Our gratitude is something that cannot be overstated. Sincerely, thank you. We’ll see y’all next time.