Preserve the habitat of an endangered woodpecker or protect private property rights — that’s the apparent quandary residents are facing in Brunswick County’s Boiling Spring Lakes region.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers, which were once plentiful across the Southeast, now are protected under the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that only 6,000 groups and 15,000 individual birds remain.
One of the few locations where the woodpeckers still thrive is Boiling Spring Lakes, a small community south of Wilmington containing prime coastal real estate. But after the Fish and Wildlife Service became involved in a local conservation effort more than a year ago, many residents faced new restrictions on what they could lawfully do with their property.
According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the woodpeckers are similar in size to North Carolina’s state bird, the cardinal. The species is named after the red streak found on each side of the male’s black cap, known as a “cockade.” As a species, the woodpeckers have stringent habitat needs. According to Pete Benjamin, field supervisor for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Raleigh, the woodpeckers prefer to nest in mature longleaf pine forests.
“They are the only woodpecker in North America that makes its cavity in a living tree, which makes it somewhat unique,” Benjamin said. “A family of woodpeckers requires at least 75 acres, and preferably 120 or more acres, of this mature pine forest to make their cavities and to feed.”
Pristine habitat locations have grown scarce over the years, to the detriment of the woodpeckers. Longleaf pines were once plentiful across the United States, Benjamin said, being the dominant forest type in the Southeast and covering about 100 million acres. Because of extensive logging in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the number has dropped to three million acres.
That trend has particularly affected the woodpeckers—they prefer longleaf pines both for nesting purposes and for feeding on the insects that populate the trees. In addition, the woodpeckers do not migrate, choosing instead to gain everything needed for survival from their longleaf pine habitat.
“It’s a surprising amount of habitat that they need in order to get the resources, the food, to sustain themselves and to reproduce,” Benjamin said. “You need quite a lot of acreage to have any sizable population of woodpeckers in any area.”
Specifically in North Carolina, the Boiling Spring Lakes region is perfectly suited to the exacting habitat standards of the woodpecker. The town is one of the few areas in Brunswick County that still supports the necessary natural resources for the bird, Benjamin said.
But that fact has presented a problem—since the woodpeckers are protected under the Endangered Species Act, landowners that have nesting sites on their land face development regulations that can often infringe on property rights.
Endangered Species Act regulations
The Endangered Species Act protects endangered species from “take,” meaning any effort to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.” The act also forbids damage to the habitat of endangered species that might result in harm to protected animals. In order to bypass the act’s regulations, landowners are required to obtain a federal permit, a process that entails added cost and time delays.
Residents are concerned about the limitations and added expense, said Joan Kinney, mayor of Boiling Spring Lakes. “The landowners, of course, are concerned, because all of a sudden that piece of property that they have is limited as far as building,” Kinney said. About 2,750 lots are affected by the regulations, all of them within the city limits.
Benjamin admitted that obtaining authorization is time-consuming. “If [your land] is occupied red-cockaded woodpecker habitat, and the clearing of trees to build a house is going to result in harm to the family of woodpeckers occupying that territory, then folks need authorization from the Fish and Wildlife Service before they cut down those trees,” he said. The federal permitting process could take more than a year, Benjamin said.
Despite the time requirements for a permit, Benjamin said that no regulations are going to prevent property owners in Boiling Spring Lakes from developing their land. “At the end of the day, everyone will be able to do whatever they want with their property,” he said. “No one is going to be denied use of their property because of these woodpeckers.”
But Kinney has already seen a loss of property value and a reduction in new development in the town. “We’ve already seen the growth decrease tremendously,” she said.
In terms of the local economy, the environmental regulations have had two direct affects on the real estate market, said Steve Candler, government affairs director for the Brunswick County Association of Realtors. Fewer new homes being built translates into fewer listings for Realtors, causing some real estate agents to struggle financially and two realty offices to close in recent months, Candler said. Some people also mistakenly perceive that the town is “closed for business” and that development is prohibited.
“This is far from the truth,” Candler said. “After the [Realtors] stepped up to the plate and partnered with the Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission to move the process forward and to educate the citizens and landowners on the grant process, some of the panic and ‘doom and gloom’ has disappeared.”
Protection vs. property rights
One question facing the town is how to balance conservation efforts with protecting the constitutional private property rights of landowners.
Benjamin said that he understands the frustration residents face and that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to alleviate some of the angst. One of the ways to do that is by streamlining the permitting process to make it “more accessible” and “less cumbersome” for single-family lot owners.
“That’s what we’re working on now—trying to get some sort of streamlined process in place for the residents of Boiling Spring Lakes so that they don’t need to go through a protracted permitting process with the federal government,” he said.
But Rick Stroup, visiting professor of economics at North Carolina State University, said that environmental regulations that cause a reduction in property value to the owner are “counterproductive” and “inequitable” in many cases. In a 1995 research paper that discussed potential changes to the Endangered Species Act, Stroup argued that changing “the status of endangered species from the landowner’s enemy to the landowner’s friend” would make the act more effective on private property. Stroup suggested revising the act to recognize that a property right has been taken when the federal government imposes habitat standards on landowners.
“If such recognition occurs, the Fish and Wildlife Service will have to follow the clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that requires compensation when the government takes property,” Stroup wrote. “So far, no actions of the Fish and Wildlife Service under the ESA have been judged to be ‘takings’ of property rights.”
Stroup said that eliminating “specific disincentives” from the act is one fundamental change needing to be made. In his paper, Stroup also emphasized the importance of involving the private sector in environmental protection. “A number of federal laws could be changed to allow environmental groups to bid for the lease or purchase of federal lands to protect endangered species habitat (or pursue other environmental goals),” he wrote.
But at least to Kinney, changing federal regulations is not an option. “[The regulations are] federally mandated and unfortunately there’s not much we can do except try to figure out what is the best plan for our city,” she said. “We’re still in the process of looking at all the possibilities, and have not come up with anything concrete yet.”
Landowner panic?
According to a Raleigh News and Observer article published in August, some residents of Boiling Spring Lakes are taking matters into their own hands by cutting down longleaf pines on their property before the woodpeckers show up. Once wooded lots are now “scraped bare to the white sandy soil,” causing alarm among city leaders, the article said.
Kinney said that Boiling Spring Lakes is not having as much trouble with clear-cutting today because of a tree ordinance recently approved by the Town Council.
“No one can cut these larger trees down unless they come to us with an application for a building permit to build a house on that property,” she said.
“I think a lot of [the tree cutting] was generated by some misinformation and resulting fear on the part of the citizens,” Benjamin said.
Landowners are not compensated in any way for delays or expenses incurred by the regulations, Benjamin said. “It is frustrating for landowners, I know,” he said. “We’re working to alleviate some of that frustration. We’re not there yet. We will get there, one way or another.”
Is coexistence possible?
In an effort to protect ecology and endangered species, environmental groups and initiatives such as the Wildlands Project are attempting to reserve “safe passageways” for wildlife throughout North America. These set-aside areas would be closed to humans except for traditional national park activities, such as hiking, primitive camping, and wildlife observation. But at least in Boiling Spring Lakes, the consensus seems to be that forced isolation is unnecessary—mankind and wildlife can coexist without difficulty.
“These birds can live and get along quite well in a suburban sort of environment,” Benjamin said. “Woodpeckers and people can coexist quite peaceably, so it’s not really a question of the birds versus the people or development versus preservation or any of those things you commonly hear.”
Kinney said that the woodpeckers will nest in neighborhoods and are not found strictly in undeveloped or remote areas. “People have them in their front yard or in their back yard,” she said.
In fact, the woodpeckers at Fort Bragg military base, another region containing populations of the endangered woodpeckers, might actually prefer being near humans rather than in remote areas. Since the base implemented conservation tactics around a decade ago, the woodpeckers have surprised environmentalists and military personnel alike by increasing in number much faster than anticipated. A Fort Bragg press release in June reported that the woodpeckers’ numbers have risen from 238 clusters in 1992 to 368 clusters today.
Mike Lynch, director of plans, training, and mobilization for Fort Bragg, said that the woodpeckers will commonly nest in spots where human activity takes place.
“They will go where the habitat is, and if that habitat is in a very heavily used training area with soldiers in and around it, they will go there; if it is off in the far corner where very few people go, they will go there,” he said. “They’re really looking for a good habitat that’s free of obstruction—not a lot of undergrowth, not a lot of debris that would allow predators to easily infiltrate their nests, and if you have that, they will do quite well.”
While the base initially had training restrictions in place prohibiting human activity near woodpecker nesting sites, Lynch said that restricted areas have decreased over the years until today when the base is working with Fish and Wildlife Service to relax all of the restrictions.
“[The birds] are everywhere,” he said. “We have a little phrase around here that they must like soldiers, because everywhere soldiers are, you’ll find woodpeckers.”
“We’ve learned over time that you can meet your training mission, protect the species, and do positive good by protecting the environment, protecting your landscape and your forests for the long-term,” Lynch said. “And, of course, since this is the only land we have, we’re very interested in maintaining it so that we can train soldiers here for hundreds of years to come.”
On the issue of whether the woodpeckers can be protected and whether economic growth is still possible in Boiling Spring Lakes, Stroup sees action in the private sector as helpful. “Private preservation would work, as would the rental by agencies of private (or other agency) land for specific habitat work,” he said.
From a realty and marketing perspective, Candler said he thinks that the woodpeckers could actually attract residents to the town by creating a unique coastal environment. “The barrier islands have their sea turtles—Boiling Spring Lakes has their red-cockaded woodpeckers,” he said.
Benjamin said that the woodpeckers and humans could coexist if the “necessary processes” are in place. “There’s just some planning necessary to make sure that happens,” he said. “And when it does happen, and it will happen, one way or another, the people of Boiling Spring Lakes will be better off, and the woodpeckers will be better off.”
David N. Bass is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.