♪ [birds chirping] SPEAKER: Here's to the land of the longleaf pine, ♪ [birds chirping] the summer land where the sun doth shine, where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great, here's to down home, the Old North State.

[frog croaking] [cannons booming] NARRATOR: North Carolina, the Old North State, also embraces destruction.

And although an army training ground might seem like the last place to find wildlife, this firing range is also a haven for an endangered species.

♪ An improbable alliance that's giving one special bird a chance at a comeback.

♪ And its recovery is among the most inspiring conservation stories in American history.

[bird chirping] ♪ ♪ [door creaking] ♪ JESSIE: I've always been interested in birds ever since I was a kid.

I love being outdoors and it just so happened that there was a job opening here, so I started working with the woodpecker.

NARRATOR: Jessie Schillaci is a wildlife biologist, but you won't find her on a nature preserve, or in a national park.

She's embedded at Fort Bragg Military Base.

JESSIE: I've been on Fort Bragg for approximately 20 years.

Oh, you might want to put your camera down here.

This is a Special Forces compound, sorry.

♪ NARRATOR: With almost 50,000 active duty soldiers, North Carolina's Fort Bragg is the largest military base in the US by population.

It's also ground zero for an extraordinary partnership between the US military and conservationists, who turned from enemies to allies to save one plucky bird from extinction.

[guns firing] [bird chirping] The red-cockaded woodpecker, or RCW for short.

RCW numbers have plummeted over the last century, from 1 1/2 million breeding groups prior to 1910 to just 4,000 in 1995.

And that decline had a lot to do with where the bird lives.

The RCW makes its home like other woodpeckers, by drumming its beak into a tree's heartwood to carve a cavity for a nest.

But it's the type of tree they choose that makes the RCW unique.

JESSIE: It's really the only woodpecker in North America that excavates living pine trees.

It takes them one to 10 years to excavate an entire cavity.

A generation of RCWs is considered four years, so you could consider it multi-generational.

NARRATOR: A living pine is full of sap and pecking around the entrance creates a sticky blockade against one of the RCW's most agile predators, the tree-climbing rat snake.

The sap gets caught between the snake's scales, causing it to lose its grip and fall.

To avoid getting stuck in the sap, RCWs preen their feet and feathers daily.

[bird chirping] ♪ Most RCW cavities are drilled into a magnificent species called the longleaf pine.

Trees need to be at least 60 years old to be thick enough for a cavity.

Longleaf pines can grow up to 120 feet tall, which makes studying the birds that live in them an extreme sport.

JESSIE: I'm about to start the process of peeping this 60 foot cavity tree.

It may or may not be on nestlings and we're about to find out.

NARRATOR: To monitor the RCW population, or peep, as they call it, Jessie and her team use a very specialized camera.

JESSIE: They created this camera that's protected against sap and bumping and dropping to figure out what's in the cavities.

Oh, do- down.

Don't move it, I gotta come down a little bit.

PAULA: Okay.

JESSIE: All right, down, yeah, right there.

PAULA: Right there?

JESSIE: Yeah, hang on.

There.

What do ya got?

We have three nestlings!

Okay, great.

It's like an Easter egg hunt.

That's exciting 'cause we want these birds to procreate on the landscape, to help recover them as a species.

A cluster of trees will have one group of birds and one nest in it.

A male and a female can pull off a nest, but we found out that more successful nests are produced from a male, a female, and one, two, or three helper males, because everybody's helping to feed the nestlings.

NARRATOR: The peep-cam also reveals others who rely on these dwellings.

Birds moving into abandoned nests, and squirrels and larger birds that evict RCWs and enlarge the cavities, creating cozy homes for wood ducks and other species.

In fact, the creatures of the longleaf pine depend on the cavities so much, the woodpecker is considered a keystone species, a creature that helps hold an entire ecosystem together.

That RCW-dependent ecosystem unravels if there aren't enough pine trees to make cavities in.

♪ [tree falling] These open, sunny forests once spanned 90 million acres, before colonists began felling the longleaf pines for ship-building.

JESSIE: The naval stores were using these very tall and very sturdy pine trees as ship masts.

And then, they started collecting resin and creating tar, because they're so sappy.

NARRATOR: As the pines disappeared, so did the red -cockaded woodpecker.

By 1970, a mere 3% of the original forests remained and the RCW landed on the endangered species list.

The outlook seemed bleak, until scientists made a surprising discovery.

RCW numbers were actually increasing within the challenging confines of Fort Bragg.

[helicopter whirring] Figuring out why was no easy feat because it was a pretty challenging landscape for scientists too.

JESSIE: We're working with the military but we always get the comment that we're called the Pecker Checkers and that they don't like us.

♪ MIKE: Fort Bragg almost shut down, over a single species.

Hell, I- I worked here for five years, literally, before I ever saw a woodpecker and I had to go looking for it.

♪ NARRATOR: Mike Lynch has spent 34 years on the base, and knows every inch of it.

MIKE: Fort Bragg is pretty much 170,000 acres of primarily all longleaf forest.

But when you get off base, you can see clearly for miles and miles where there used to be large swaths of habitat, longleaf pine growth.

So that is one of the reasons that Fort Bragg has such a great population of woodpeckers, is because they were literally forced onto us.

NARRATOR: With so few longleaf pine forests left outside the base, Fort Bragg, to its dismay, became an oasis of RCW habitat.

The stage was set for a battle even the US military wasn't prepared for.

MIKE: Commanders ultimately, their number one responsibility is to make sure their soldiers are prepared to deploy on a moment's notice.

And we know that the better trained they are, the more likely they are to return from that deployment.

In 1990, we got this letter from this small organization called the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

And it basically said, "Your training is affecting "the continued existence of the red-cockaded woodpecker.

And you need to halt and desist."

♪ When we first got our restrictions, we could not maneuver, couldn't fire, had to avoid areas.

We had soldiers more concerned with, "Am I near a woodpecker?"

than they were about, "Is this the right place to lay an ambush?"

And eventually it went to the White House and we held meetings and we held more meetings.

Half the room were army guys, half the people were environmentalists.

We couldn't sit for 25 minutes without almost going into fisticuffs.

NARRATOR: As negotiations dragged on, biologists realized something rather odd about where the RCWs were choosing to nest.

[guns firing] MIKE: Today, we fire the most sophisticated weapons in the world here and do it very well.

MAN: Fire!

[cannons booming] MIKE: The most dense population of woodpeckers resides inside those impact areas.

[gun firing] We kind of thought, hey, if they're thriving and doing well in the impact areas, maybe, maybe our training isn't all that bad.

[helicopter whirring] NARRATOR: The military and the conservation community were about to make a colossal discovery, born of fire.

[fire crackling] BRIAN: I get to work with fire.

You really can't ask for a whole lot better than that.

So, it's a, yeah, it's a fun place to work.

NARRATOR: Like Jessie, Brian Ball is a biologist here at Fort Bragg.

But instead of scaling longleaf pines, he uses prescribed burns to manage the forest floor around them.

[fire crackling] BRIAN: They're low intensity fires, and they basically just clean the fuel off the ground, knock back some of the midstory trees.

NARRATOR: The burns resemble the natural fires that lightning storms used to spark more frequently in the southeastern US.

BRIAN: These disturbances are very important to the natural environment.

NARRATOR: Many plants and animals evolved to withstand fire, and even depend on it.

The thick bark of the longleaf pine, and its young seedlings, which resemble a clump of grass, are naturally resistant to fire.

The flames clear out competing vegetation, and leave behind nutrients the pine needs to thrive.

Charred wood also attracts beetles that the RCWs love to eat.

BRIAN: You'll get green buds coming up two days, three days after the fire from wiregrass, Bracken fern, lots of the fire adaptive, fire loving species, they respond very, very quickly after a fire.

NARRATOR: Despite the benefits of these natural fire cycles, US policy over most of the last century was to suppress them.

The understory grew thick and America's forests became vulnerable to catastrophic fires.

But not here at Fort Bragg, where the forest regularly catches fire by accident.

[guns firing] BRIAN: The military is very good at starting fires.

But most start from actual tracer rounds from machine guns.

NARRATOR: The Army also sets prescribed burns to help manage the landscape for its war games.

♪ Conservationists soon realized that the Army was unknowingly creating optimal conditions for the longleaf to thrive.

♪ The best way to help the red-cockaded woodpecker was already routine at Fort Bragg.

And the woodpecker wasn't the only beneficiary.

NICK: Oh, this site is beautiful!

NARRATOR: Another species that relies on frequently burnt habitat is also found at Fort Bragg, and nowhere else.

BRIAN: Four weeks since the burn.

NICK: Four weeks ago?

BRIAN: Yep.

NARRATOR: When Brian's not busy throwing flames, he's tromping through wetland meadows with ecologist Nick Haddad.

Today, they're hoping to find one of the rarest species on the continent, a butterfly known as the St. Francis' satyr.

NICK: Oh, here's one.

BRIAN: You got one?

NICK: Yep.

[Brian laughs] This is the first one I've seen this year.

Exciting.

BRIAN: If you weren't looking for it specifically, you wouldn't notice it.

But they really are beautiful butterflies when you get a good look at them.

NARRATOR: Several distinct populations were discovered on the base in 1983, and scientists worked quickly to try and protect them.

NICK: The first thing I thought to do was just keep people out because if we just keep people away, the butterfly will be able to thrive again.

NARRATOR: But keeping people out wasn't enough to save these pockets of butterflies.

NICK: We saw them go extinct, one, by another, by another, and in very rapid succession.

So within about a five-year period, all those populations were lost, save one.

We had to do something different.

♪ NARRATOR: The last population of St. Francis satyrs on Earth was hanging tough on just 200 acres in the heart of Fort Bragg's artillery range.

NICK: My first thought was, wow, I could be walking into all sorts of danger, but what I really saw was what I think are the most beautiful habitats in North Carolina.

We'd see endangered plants, we'd see Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, other things that you just don't find outside.

NARRATOR: Like the longleaf pine, all of these plants, including a type of sedge the butterfly depends on, thrive on regular, low-intensity fires.

NICK: What we learned is that the military, through its activities, were doing a better job at restoration than the biologists.

NARRATOR: Fort Bragg's fire-sculpted habitat provides a sanctuary for rare species, which begs the question, can such habitat be expanded beyond the base?

JESSE: My grandfather was not a person of a lot of words.

One of the few things he ever said to me was, "If you are in the woods and you're still long enough, the forest will talk to you."

I go into the woods every day to listen, to get direction for my work.

NARRATOR: As a fourth generation landowner, Jesse Wimberly has come to know and love the longleaf pine forest and to do what he can to protect it.

90% of the forest outside Fort Bragg is a patchwork of private land.

Most are farms, like Jesse's, that have been owned and operated by the same families for generations.

If managed properly, this land could be a game changer for the red-cockaded woodpecker.

JESSE: This is one of the most important areas of the entire North Carolina restoration effort, is right through here.

This is what we call the gap.

This is Fort Bragg.

This is 70,000 acres of Camp Mackall in the game lands.

So we're talking about roughly 400,000 acres between these two and what separates them is a small little area of private landowners in between.

♪ NARRATOR: Bridging this gap would not only expand the RCW's range, it would also safeguard the entire longleaf pine ecosystem on these private lands.

But the relationship between conservationists and landowners got off to a rocky start.

PRESIDENT NIXON: The great qu estion of the '70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings?

Or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

[audience applauding] NARRATOR: After President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, landowners could face hefty fines or even imprisonment if anything happened to RCWs on their property.

JESSE: It appeared to the landowner that a bird had more rights than they did.

They were cutting down the very trees that could be habitat for the birds to get rid of those old growth trees before you attracted a bird.

It was right here, in the Sandhills of North Carolina, where we came up with Safe Harbor which says to that private landowner, if you're out there being a good steward and restoring that landscape, and it attracts endangered species, you won't then be penalized with what you can do on that land.

As a matter of fact, you will go to the top of the stack in getting more assistance, which is the way it should be.

We should be incentivizing the behavior that we want to see.

Oh, look at the regen of the longleaf in here, it's just amazing how much.

NARRATOR: Enacted in 1995, the Safe Harbor program motivated landowners to comply with the Endangered Species Act.

And conservation-minded folks like Jesse were ready to welcome a new generation of land stewards.

JESSE: All these little dots you see are red-cockaded cavity trees, and you see a bunch over here, but historically these two populations did not know each other and they weren't dating.

We thought it'd be a good idea if we could bring these two populations together to increase genetic diversity.

But besides the conservation value of linking these two restoration efforts, what's important is having people value their land and be good stewards of their land, so that y'all can see the legacy that was started by you and your husband, passed on to the next generation.

And that's what gets me excited.

I'm fourth generation on my land.

And I know that I'm passing on something... Wow, didn't know I was going to get emotional here.

MATRIARCH: Well, this is third generation here, and their children are fourth generation.

JESSE: And what really keeps me going is meeting folks like y'all and working with you and knowing that we're doing something much larger than us.

TERRY: And we are such a fun bunch.

JESSE: And you are a fun bunch!

NARRATOR: Jesse's pitch is working.

These three landowners have chosen to set aside property for RCW habitat.

Prescribed burns are a crucial step in the process, but the landowners are not yet comfortable playing with fire.

[indistinct chatter] So today, Jesse is leading what he calls a learn and burn.

JESSE: Alright, does the burn crew have any questions about what we're doing?

NARRATOR: The Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association is a grassroots effort to build landowners' fire management skills.

JESSE: You got a lighter?

MAN: Yes, sir.

JESSE: Whoever lights the fire owns the fire and that's the way the PBA can do what we do.

We assist landowners do their own burning to create individual self-sufficient practitioners of fire.

So we will fire up.

NARRATOR: Conservation isn't all serious business when there's stuff to burn.

[fire crackling] JESSE: I hear this all the time from folks, "You mean there's other people doing this?"

So a big part of my job is just trying to bring people together with other landowners who are on the same journey as they are.

And it's fun.

These guys are a lot of fun to work with.

♪ TESS: Well, first, we're probably a little pyro in our blood, maybe.

That's one reason.

But, I mean, that's what the pine trees actually need.

♪ DAVID: We don't care about politics.

We just love fire and what happens after the fire.

NARRATOR: Folks who may have never given the red-cockaded woodpecker a second thought, or may even have resented the bird, are bonding over fire to save it.

♪ JESSE: You get to bring all the family together and set the woods on fire and have a good time, but you're actually restoring an endangered species.

And if there's any great value to me with prescribed fire, it is community building.

All right, everyone good?

It brings people together to solve community goals.

Enjoyed it.

It was- It was fun.

[indistinct chatter] MAN: Thanks for being here.

MAN 2: Yup, absolutely, yeah.

JESSE: This is what it's all about, y'all.

♪ NARRATOR: Jessie Schillaci and her team are back at the nest on Fort Bragg, where the RCW chicks are ready to earn stripes of their own.

While the adults are off looking for food, Jessie gently gathers each chick and bands them with a unique color combo and ID number.

JESSIE: We keep very detailed records of all of our birds that we band.

We have all the birds that were banded at each cluster that we monitor on Fort Bragg for the past 40 years.

NARRATOR: Their hard work is paying off.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers have doubled in number to around 8,000 breeding groups.

An astounding recovery for a species that once seemed headed for extinction.

[bird chirping] ♪ And the local community has united around the woodpecker.

It's even become the mascot of their local minor league baseball team.

♪ People of all political persuasions, living on the land of the longleaf pine, are working together to ignite a passion for wildlife.

MIKE: I'm just a basic infantry guy.

I knew bullets, I knew bangs, I knew bombs.

I didn't know anything about endangered species.

But you have to learn.

In the course of that 15 years, we've gone from conflict to collaboration.

JESSIE: I've enjoyed just watching the guys and girls training, doing something that they believe in and we're doing something that we believe in and sometimes they can overlap.

We all share the common goal of bettering our country in one way or another.

[woodpecker tapping] ♪ ♪