#longleaf pine trees

Nature Can Make Even Simple Things Beautiful explains what motivated the author to shoot and publish tonight’s featured image.

Textured Scales It never stops amazing me how nature can create so much beauty with even the simplest things. This afternoon when I got home from the office I glanced out into the yard while unloading my bag, and happened to notice this pine cone on a branch from the pine tree in my yard. We had a lot of wind this weekend, especially on Saturday, and it must have blown the branch down. The sun…

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

For decades I observed the paradox. The landscape around the coastal North Carolina home where my parents retired was being developed at a rate that I have never seen anywhere. Yet right across a frenetic, four-lane state highway from my parents’ house sat a 63,000-acre state refuge — a little gem of native habitat supporting a longleaf pine savanna and a unique wetland called pocosin or Carolina bay.

The Holly Shelter Game Lands are home to many species, including Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) and red-cockaded woodpeckers (Leuconotopicus borealis), a bird first listed as endangered in 1970 under a precursor to the federal 1973 Endangered Species Act.

When developers wedged a Dollar General between the game lands and the highway a few years ago, I trusted the Endangered Species Act to protect the red-cockaded woodpeckers living nearby.

Then, in October 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it had “downlisted” the red-cockaded woodpecker from “endangered” to “threatened” — still at risk, but in better shape thanks to ongoing conservation efforts.

That’s typically considered good news, but when I heard it, my heart sank. I could see the vise tightening on the red-cockaded woodpeckers of the Holly Shelter Game Lands.

Each time I visited North Carolina, acres of longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) had disappeared. Some were replaced by the looming piles of dirt that would become a highway bypass, meant to ease traffic and speed commuters between two of the state’s biggest cities, Wilmington and Jacksonville. Other acres of trees gave way to massive apartment complexes that turn their bland backs to the highway.

When I first told my parents, years ago, that their neighbors included a federally endangered species, the red-cockaded woodpecker, my dad waved his hand dismissively toward the birdfeeders in their backyard.

“Those woodpeckers are everywhere,” he said.

He wasn’t alone in that sentiment. In the 1990s a lot of people in North Carolina thought there were entirely too many red-cockaded woodpeckers around. The birds were, in some peoples’ minds, preventing development and logging on private property.

“They called it the woodpecker wars,” says Jeff Walters, a biology professor at Virginia Tech and a leading expert on red-cockaded woodpeckers. Rumor had it that property owners were killing the birds to avoid having their land tied up by conservation.

Peace came in 1995 with a new federal policy, the Safe Harbor Program, which allows voluntary agreements between the Fish and Wildlife Service and private landowners. The landowner promises to improve habitat for federally endangered species, and the government promises not to increase restrictions on the land, even if the population of endangered species grows.

Today they are called Conservation Benefit Agreements, and while they were created in North Carolina for red-cockaded woodpeckers, the popular program is used for many species across the country. “Even in Guam,” a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean, Walters says.

But even with this program, the woodpeckers continued to suffer and decline.