Plan for Woodpecker Habitat Approved

The Clinton administration has approved a paper company’s plan to develop a conservation bank for the endangered red cockaded woodpecker in southwest Georgia.

Jamie Clark, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the plan developed by International Paper Co. marks the first time under the Endangered Species Act that a private landowner has committed to increasing the numbers of an endangered species.

“There is certainly an economic incentive in this for International Paper,” Clark said in a telephone interview from the company’s Southlands Experiment Forest near Bainbridge, Ga. “They have a plan where they hope to one day market woodpecker credits. We think that’s great.”

The plan, developed by company biologists in consultation with the Environmental Defense Fund, calls for the paper company to manage 5,300 acres at its Southlands Forest as woodpecker habitat, including installing artificial cavities for the birds and creating new areas of nesting and foraging.

The 16 pairs of red cockaded woodpeckers now living on company land in Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina will be moved to join the two pairs now at Southlands. Once the relocated birds become established in Georgia, the company could harvest the timber on the 1,300 acres of land now tied up as woodpecker habitat in those four states.

By concentrating the birds in one area of actively managed habitat, the paper company hopes the number of pairs will increase to at least 30 over the next few years. That would enable International Paper to sell a credit for each pair over 18 to other landowners who now cannot use their property because federal law prohibits destruction of the habitat of endangered species.

A landowner with a pair of the endangered birds could buy the right to destroy the woodpecker habitat on his or her property by paying a mitigation fee to International Paper for one of the pairs the company has in excess of the 18 now on its property.

Robert Bonnie, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the company could charge as much as $100,000 per pair for such credits because most remaining red cockaded woodpecker habitat is on valuable property along the coastal plains of the Southeast.

“This will create a monetary advantage for landowners to actively manage for red cockaded woodpeckers,” he said. “They will understand that they can actually make some money for growing woodpeckers.”