Managing Oklahoma’s small red-cockaded woodpecker population on the McCurtain County Wilderness Area is a yearlong endeavor but is especially busy in late spring and early summer. That’s when the federally protected chicks hatch and biologists spend much of their time monitoring the eggs and resulting chicks. When the chicks are about a week old, they’re retrieved from the nest cavity and unique identification bands are attached to the legs.

“Each bird gets a metal band with a unique number so that if it is recaptured later in life it can be tracked back to its origin at the McCurtain County Wilderness Area,” said Clay Barnes, wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Department. “We also add color bands that denote the year the bird was hatched. This lets us visually track the birds as they mature and hopefully establish new territories on the Wilderness Area.”

STATUS UPDATE:

The Department of the Interior recently announced that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has downlisted the red-cockaded woodpecker from endangered to threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. This milestone is the result of five decades of collaborative conservation efforts between the Interior Department, federal and state partners, Tribes, the private sector and private landowners that have resulted in increasing populations of these remarkable birds throughout their range.