CARMELLA STIRRAT KNOWS how to burn a forest. She’s done it dozens of times—often enough that at a prescribed fire in April, she was certain she had time for a rescue mission. She was worried about a particular longleaf pine tree amid thousands of others in the 53-acre burn area at Carvers Creek State Park in North Carolina. Surveyors had recently discovered endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers nesting in it. With the fire she’d helped start that morning fast approaching, Stirrat plunged into the brush to ensure the invaluable tree would survive the blaze.
She hacked with a mattock at flammable shrubs crowding its base, revved up a leaf blower to clear dry needles that could loft flames into the canopy, then scampered out. The flames arrived, obliterating small sweetgum trees, shrubs, and just about everything else on the forest floor. They climbed into the canopies of large pines, borne aloft on updrafts powered by the heat itself. Flaming branches and chunks of pine bark floated to the ground.
As the blaze moved, leaving smoldering earth in its wake, Stirrat and her colleagues looked with a deep satisfaction at what they had done. Wielding fire like a painter applies a brush, they had wiped away years of overgrown vegetation, renewing the ecosystem. And to her relief, the nest tree was unscathed, promising refuge for at least one of the estimated 15,000 Redcockaded Woodpeckers alive today.
Stirrat, fire program manager for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in North Carolina, works on the front lines of a complex conservation campaign to restore a tree, a bird, and an ecosystem that exist nowhere else on Earth. Longleaf pine forests once ruled a swath of the Southeast from Tidewater Virginia to east Texas to central Florida—almost 5 percent of the continental United States. But by the latter part of the 20th century, longleaf pine had been wiped out from more than 95 percent of the estimated 90 million acres it once commanded. Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, which live only in the Southeast’s oldgrowth pine forests, plummeted to fewer than 10,000 birds, landing on the endangered species list in 1970.
Since then, a coalition of landowners and conservationists has worked to restore the tree and the bird. America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative (ALRI) has accelerated the endeavor, using prescribed fires and tree plantings to increase longleaf habitat by nearly 50 percent since 2009. Woodpeckers have followed.
Despite these
