RCW outside its cavity in the Francis Marion National Forest, South Carolina
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The Last Mile: How sustained, targeted investment can help imperiled wildlife recover
Sustained investment helped bring the red-cockaded woodpecker and Kirtland’s warbler back from the brink of extinction. A new NFWF initiative is betting the same approach can work for additional imperiled species.
Kirtland's warbler in Michigan
It takes a red-cockaded woodpecker roughly two to seven years to excavate a single nesting cavity, and in longleaf pine, the job can run considerably longer. Most other woodpecker species go after dead trees and finish drilling a cavity in weeks. Red-cockaded woodpeckers (RCWs), by contrast, chisel into the heartwood of a living pine, drilling small resin wells around the entrance so that sap bleeds down the bark, helping deter predatory rat snakes. RCWs prefer trees that are at least 60 years old, and the surrounding forest has to be burned at least once every three years, or else the underbrush closes in and the birds move out. It takes square miles of that kind of forest, sustained for generations, to support a population of RCWs, and it took the better part of a century of fire suppression, fragmentation and development to take that forest away.
Federal species protection runs on a similarly long timeline. A species is listed as endangered or threatened only after a formal review determines it faces a serious risk of extinction. A recovery plan is developed for each listed species spelling out specific, measurable criteria — population size, range, habitat condition — that must be met before its status can be updated. Reclassifying a species to a less severe status, known as downlisting, or removing it from the list altogether, known as delisting, requires a new status review, a public comment period and an independent scientific review. The process is slow and deliberate by design, ensuring that one good breeding season isn’t mistaken for real recovery.
The RCW’s downlisting took 50 years and was never the result of one decisive act. Neither was the recovery of Kirtland’s warbler, a small Great Lakes songbird that faced an entirely different set of obstacles, but followed a similar path: decades of unglamorous, compounding investment — funding applications, research, field work — until the species met a recovery benchmark established years earlier.
As NFWF and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announce the inaugural round of National Species Recovery Grants, two NFWF focal species, RCW and Kirtland’s warbler, show what sustained, targeted investment can accomplish, and why the work of recovery doesn’t end with downlisting or delisting.
The red-cockaded woodpecker’s long road back
RCWs once ranged from New Jersey to Florida, west to Texas and north to Missouri. But the bird depends on a very specific habitat — mature, open pine forest maintained by frequent fire — and over the 20th century, those conditions all but disappeared. More than a century of habitat loss reduced the RCW’s range to a handful of states in the Southeast. The bird was federally listed as endangered in 1970 when the species had fallen to an estimated 1,470 clusters, with each cluster consisting of a family group and the stand of cavity trees it defends.
Decades of collaborative conservation, including extensive work by private landowners, changed that trajectory. FWS now counts roughly 7,800 RCW clusters across 11 states, from southern Virginia to eastern Texas. In October 2024, the Department of the Interior downlisted the bird from endangered to threatened, a reclassification 50 years in the making.
NFWF has been part of that story for more than two decades. Its investment in the Southeast’s longleaf pine range includes more than $40 million in grants for longleaf pine restoration and RCW recovery. That funding has supported prescribed burns, cavity inserts, bird translocations and habitat agreements with private landowners, all conservation activities and tools that helped drive the species’ rebound.
A biologist banded an RCW chick in the Francis Marion National Forest
White paint marks a tree with a cavity used by RCWs
The RCW is considered a keystone species, because once a bird abandons a cavity, the hole rarely sits empty. Other birds, reptiles, insects and even small mammals move in, many of them unable to excavate the resin-soaked wood on their own. Remove the woodpecker from a longleaf forest, and many other species lose shelter. The forest itself works on the same principle at a larger scale. The longleaf range is home to more than 900 plant species found nowhere else on earth as well as 40 other threatened or endangered species. These forests also filter drinking water across much of the Southeast. It is the case for preserving biodiversity in miniature: pull one thread, and you find it’s rarely just one thread.
RCWs remain threatened and vulnerable to habitat loss, fragmentation and severe weather that can erase years of progress in a single season. Hurricane Helene, for example, destroyed 18 nest cavity trees at one Florida site. That vulnerability is why continued investment matters, and why this year’s National Species Recovery Grants slate includes two new Arkansas projects for RCW. The Nature Conservancy will use prescribed fire and timber thinning to restore open-pine foraging habitat and connectivity corridors. The Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission will install 50 prefabricated nesting cavities, translocate juvenile birds and work with landowners to increase RCW populations across southern Arkansas by an estimated 5 percent annually.
Building a partnership around Kirtland’s warbler
Kirtland’s warbler faced a different combination of challenges. This small, striking songbird nests on the ground beneath young jack pine in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario. Each fall, it flies more than a thousand miles to the Bahamas and returns each spring to the same patch of young pine. Biologists consider the Kirtland’s warbler an indicator species: how the bird is faring offers insight into the health of the broader jack pine ecosystem and the other species that depend on it.
The warbler’s habitat once renewed itself through fire. As wildfires killed mature stands, the heat would pop open fallen pinecones to allow a new stand to grow. After decades of fire suppression, that cycle broke, and suitable warbler nesting habitat disappeared faster than it could be replaced. Biologists monitoring the species from the 1940s recorded a steady decline. The bird was listed as endangered in 1967 and carried onto the rolls of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when the law took effect in 1973. By 1974, the population had fallen to 167 breeding pairs. A second problem compounded the habitat loss: brown-headed cowbirds, a nest parasite that lay eggs in other birds’ nests, leaving the host to raise a cowbird chick that outcompetes the host’s own young for food.
For nearly four decades after that low point, the warbler’s recovery depended largely on direct action. FWS began trapping cowbirds in 1972, cutting parasitism rates from roughly 70 percent to single digits within a year. Michigan’s state forestry agency, working with the U.S. Forest Service, began cutting and replanting jack pine on a rotation timed to the warbler’s needs. Population growth was slow through the 1970s and 1980s, then accelerated after 1987. By 2001, the population had passed the recovery plan’s target of 1,000 breeding pairs.
That long run of success created a new problem. Nearly every dollar behind the effort — the cowbird traps, the survey crews, the cutting and replanting — came from ESA funding tied directly to the bird’s listing. None of it was designed to survive delisting, which by the early 2010s was clearly approaching. Beginning around 2010, NFWF adopted Kirtland’s warbler as a keystone species with a business plan and proposed a strategy to address that gap: a partnership built on a “Friends” group dedicated to the bird, a long-term funding source for cowbird control, formal agency commitments to continue habitat management regardless of the bird’s listing status and the institutional infrastructure to hold those pieces together. The plan led to the Kirtland’s Warbler Alliance in 2013 and an endowed designated fund intended to support cowbird control and habitat work over the long term. Partners led by Huron Pines and FWS raised $1 million to seed the fund.
Six years after that plan took shape, FWS announced in October 2019 that Kirtland’s warbler, one of the earliest species protected under federal endangered species legislation, had officially recovered. The population had grown to more than 2,300 breeding pairs, more than double the original target. Surveyors have since logged record counts in Wisconsin and Ontario as the bird’s range continues to expand.
Despite its remarkable comeback, the Kirtland’s warbler remains conservation-reliant: without continued forest management and cowbird control, its numbers could decline again. The partnership model NFWF helped establish reflects that reality in mind, giving the species a durable support system rather than a one-time fix.
Helping more species reach the “last mile” of recovery
NFWF and FWS are applying lessons from recoveries like these through the National Species Recovery Grants program. The program targets species that a few more years of well-placed funding could plausibly move across the recovery line, as well as species whose ranges overlap extensively with working lands used for farming, ranching, forestry and other land uses.
The program is designed to fund the “last mile” of species recovery. By the time a grant like this arrives, much of what a species needs is usually already in place: decades of research, habitat work and patient management. What’s missing is the last increment: 50 artificial cavities, a thinned forest, a cowbird trap checked for one more season.
The RCW and Kirtland’s warbler each took roughly 50 years to reach their current status, following paths that look quite different — one bird patiently drilling its own home out of living wood, the other dependent on active forest management to make a home — but are more alike than they first appear. As the National Species Recovery Grants program moves new projects into the field, NFWF and FWS are hoping the same formula holds for the species that comes next: not one decisive act, but small, sustained investments that compound for as long as recovery takes.