NEXT GENERATION

WHILE YOU’RE IN THE GRASS STAGE

By Patrick Ma, The Nature Conservancy South Carolina

Many longleaf advocates understand the importance of increasing public understanding of conservation and management. Still, we often lack the tools to engage one of our most captive audiences — KIDS! Find inspiration for your inner educator with unique resources from across the longleaf range.

Turning a Loss into Learning

B. C.

A. The RCW cavity was salvaged from a windthrown longleaf pine and repurposed into an interpretive display. The display provides an inside look into why these birds are clever engineers and their relationship with longleaf. It touches on three desirable qualifications for a cavity tree: tree size, age, and fungal decay. B. The cross-section pivots open along the vertical plane on hinges. Note the characteristic upward angle of the entrance into the cavity. Evidence of red heart disease is clearly visible in the heartwood above the cavity. RCWs select trees based on size and age, but research suggests that they also may use the presence of exterior cankers on the tree trunk to identify red heart disease which makes the inner wood, or the heartwood, soft and easier to excavate. C. The tree itself is roughly 122 years-old. By back-dating from 2019, this tree germinated around 1897. Photos by Patrick Ma.

My colleague, Matt, and I discovered the fallen longleaf while prepping for visitors to The Nature Conservancy’s Sandy Island Preserve in South Carolina. Only a few staff had been on the island since the start of the 2019 hurricane season, so our best guess is that Hurricane Dorian likely toppled this tree. The tree used to provide a convenient and up-close look at an active redcockaded woodpecker (RCW) cavity, standing merely 20 feet from the edge of the road. At first, Matt and I stuck our eyes right in the cavity’s entrance hole and half-heartedly joked about how visitors would now be able to get a ‘real close’ look at a cavity. After pausing for a moment, our creative juices started flowing. We thought more seriously, “What if we could cut the cavity in half?” We both remembered a similar display at the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Heritage Center. We marinated on that idea for the rest of the day and later posed it to our conservation team. With leadership approval and permission from U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, our seasonal fire crew salvaged the cavity and, using chainsaws and polyurethane, cut and finished the display.

The display is an invaluable and portable visual aid about the relationship between the ‘birds and the trees.’ We plan to use this as a teaching tool at donor events and local festivals like the annual Sewee Fire Festival and South Carolina’s Wood Magic Forest Fair. Thanks to the team effort, a small part of this old-growth longleaf pine will impact and educate many people.