SUFFOLK — The red-cockaded woodpecker is one seriously picky bird.
He wants to nest in pine trees - but only those that are more than 60 years old, preferably infected with red heart rot fungus. He'll only live in forests where the trees are spread thin, a few dozen feet apart. If any hardwoods like oak and maple grow up and block the view from his front porch, he'll turn up his little beak and fly away.
And, maybe worst of all, even after he finds the perfect spot, in the perfect tree, he'll chip away at its bark, causing sticky resin to flow down and coat the trunk, to protect his family from predators. Sounds good, right?
Except that resin is a fire hazard.
"They are high-maintenance critters," said Don Schwab, a wildlife biologist for the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Suffolk. "They don't make it easy."
But that doesn't stop Schwab from trying. The refuge is in the first phases of an ambitious project to thin out 2,000 acres of pine tree forest in the eastern part of the swamp - just above the North Carolina line- to make a home for the choosy and endangered creatures.
Red-cockaded woodpeckers, or RCWs, as birders call them, once inhabited an area that stretched from Florida to New Jersey and as far west as Texas and Oklahoma.
But logging has slowly eaten away at the birds' habitat. Hardly any trees are allowed to grow to the age at which RCWs like them best anymore; older trees are more vulnerable to disease, and diseased trees can't be used for lumber.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the bird's habitat has shrunk to about 3 percent of its original expanse, and that the RCW population is down to about 14,000 birds .
The last time one of the woodpeckers was spotted in the Great Dismal Swamp was in the early 1970s, Schwab said.
In Virginia, a state where they were once common, the only RCWs live in Sussex County on the Piney Grove Preserve.
The preserve, through a program of thinning out its forests and carrying out occasional controlled burns, started out with 11 woodpeckers in 1991 and has raised that number to about 40. It's a success story Great Dismal Swamp officials hope to repeat.
So far, the refuge has thinned out about 300 acres of pond and loblolly pine forest down to about 25 trees per acre, using a logging company that pays for the lumber. That creates the "park-like atmosphere" the birds favor, Schwab said. Those acres, along with other areas of the refuge, will then be subjected to controlled burns, to kill off the hardwood trees the woodpeckers dislike so much.
By the start of next summer, Schwab said he hopes to have about 1,000 acres of habitat ready. And within one or two years, he said, the swamp could be ready to bring in its first breeding pair of birds.
"I should live long enough to see woodpeckers here in the swamp again," he said.
The refuge will hold public hearings on the issue before any birds are actually brought in, Schwab said, to address any concerns from nearby property owners.
The black and white birds - the males have a tiny red spot behind their eyes, known as the "cockade" - are a favorite among bird watchers. They're social creatures that live in family clans: breeding pairs mate for life, and young males remain with their parents for a year or more after they're born, helping to incubate eggs and feed their younger brothers and sisters once they're hatched.
They might be high maintenance, but creating the kind of habitat RCWs like will also provide a home for other rare animals, like the Southern fox squirrel and the Bachman's sparrow, which also live in the "pine savanna" setting that the woodpeckers prefer, Schwab said.
And that's a good thing, because even after the custom-thinned pine forests are complete, there's no guarantee that those finicky little woodpeckers will stay where biologists put them, Schwab said.
"We can bring 'em up here, we can put 'em in the trees ... and hopefully they'll stick around," he said. "It's not just science, it's an art."
Red-cockaded woodpeckers were once common throughout the Southeast. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are only about 14,000 left, and only about 40 still in Virginia. Most of their habitat - the longleaf pine ecosystem - has been destroyed by logging.
You can download the sounds of a red-cockaded woodpecker from the National Audubon Society's Websiteathttp://web1.audubon.org/science/species/audio/red-cockaded_woodpecker.mp3.