AWARDEE: Jeff Walters

FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES: Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, USDA Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Baby birds are known for leaving the nest – just not the ones in Jeff Walters’ world.

That’s because Walters is an expert in the red-cockaded woodpecker, an endangered species in which the babies often stick close to home after they’re grown. Walters’ research on the birds backed up his hypothesis that the homebody birds had an evolutionary advantage. What he didn’t expect at the start was that his work would lead to a whole new way to protect the birds and help grow their numbers.

Red-cockaded woodpecker (522 Productions)

Quality Through Quantity

Though Walters is now known for conservation work, it wasn’t always in his plans. He grew up as a nature-loving kid in Ohio, Illinois, and West Virginia, and earned his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Chicago in 1980. “My passion was to watch animals and to quantify things,” he says. Walters recalls this was around the time the field of behavioral ecology began to shift from largely qualitative to more quantitative research, which suited his interests perfectly. Bird behavior, in particular, fascinated him, and after a dashed attempt at studying sanderlings, he developed an interest in red-cockaded woodpeckers because of the unusual way they cared for their offspring: a practice called “cooperative breeding.”

Cooperative breeding is a rare practice in which animals breed in family groups – meaning that, in addition to the male and female parents, some of the young stay at home with the family and help raise their younger siblings, as opposed to leaving the nest and starting their own families, as most birds do.

“There were a lot of questions about altruism in animals,” Walters says about his early years in the field. “Are animals sacrificing their own reproduction to help other individuals? It was about trying to explain something that didn’t seem to follow natural selection. Why are they staying at home, and why are they doing the helping?”

No Place Like Home

Walters took a position at North Carolina State University, where he developed an interest in the red-cockaded woodpeckers, which are primarily found in the southeastern United States. Their natural habitat spans millions of acres of public and private land, but at that time, many biologists who followed the species were worried about its survival. The red-cockaded woodpecker was among the first birds protected under the Endangered Species Act, which became law in 1973.

Walters’ first National Science Foundation grant involved exploring the red-cockaded woodpeckers’ social system. Specifically, he was interested in measuring how many birds left their families versus how many stayed, and what happened to them later in their life. It was through that first grant that he observed how long it takes the woodpeckers to create a tree cavity to form their nests. He also learned that the birds who stayed home actually had better outcomes than those who left. The question was why?

One thing that struck Walters during those initial studies was that the birds did better when they took the time to find a good breeding opportunity by waiting at home. What made some of the best homes for new offspring were actually old cavities created by previous red-cockaded woodpeckers. Creating a new cavity from scratch could take the birds several years, so finding existing ones means the potential for many more offspring over their life spans. This challenge was among the many factors that likely contributed to the red-cockaded woodpeckers’ decline as a species. Cavities could only be made in old trees with lots of hardwood in the middle. These same old trees that the birds favored, including the longleaf pine, were being cut down, and whole territories were being lost, Walters recalls. He began to think of the population as being defined by family groups, rather than individual birds. And he came up with an idea.

From the Forest, a New Plan

Walters thought that if land managers created cavities for the birds, it would help the woodpeckers immensely by making it quicker and more efficient for them to establish new territories and family groups. (This approach, for the record, does not cause serious damage to the trees.) He hoped to test this theory working directly with forest managers, but he was new to the field, and the feedback he received was far from encouraging. They told him it was the “dumbest idea they had ever heard,” Walters recollects.

Luckily, his basic research grants were more successful. Walters was able to apply to the NSF to further investigate the woodpeckers’ collective breeding patterns, specifically whether it was the presence of cavities that helped make the territories high quality. “When they were waiting at home in a familiar territory protected by their family, we knew they that had a better rate of survival. The idea was to make new cavities, and if we were right, we would get new family groups. We tested 20 new sites with artificial cavities and 20 control sites, and we got new groups in 19 out of 20. At the time, it was the largest growth of a red-cockaded woodpecker population ever seen.”

Walters published his theory in a 1991 paper proposing a new management paradigm for red-cockaded woodpeckers. It involved “cavity management”: making cavities and replacing lost ones in existing woodpecker territories. (There are other elements to protecting the birds as well, particularly controlled burns conducted by forest managers.) “People were killing snakes and other predators, focusing on the enemies of the species, and we felt they didn’t need to do that. The problem was all about the cavities,” he says. It was the NSF study and the subsequent paper that got Walters involved in conservation. He began advising federal forestry officials in the southern region on the relevant science. The correlation between woodpecker population increases and the creation and protection of cavities was “very clear,” Walters says. “There aren’t many stories like this in behavioral ecology. There’s a direct path from basic research findings to recovery.”

Still, a lot had to happen to translate Walters’ research into practice. In the 1990s, there was so much conflict about how to manage the red-cockaded woodpeckers, stakeholders started calling it the “woodpecker wars.” It took more than a decade for Walters’ plan to become a widespread practice, but in 2003, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service finalized a recovery plan that incorporated the cavity management. USFWS has also orchestrated “safe harbor” agreements with private landowners to incentivize species protection.

Growing Data Sets and Building Partnerships

One of Walters’ former students, Caren Cooper, remembers Walters as an inspiring mentor with a gift for keeping track of things. “He has decades of data sets on the birds that are pristine,” she says. Cooper met Walters at a science talk when she was a high school student and ended up becoming his Ph.D. student; she is now a forestry and environmental resources professor at NC State. “What I find interesting about Jeff’s story is the number of different agencies and stakeholders involved, which Jeff has navigated very well,” she adds. “He’s not an extrovert, yet it requires a lot of people skills to work with the USFWS, all the different state agencies, all the different military branches and agencies, and also the neighbors, which could be individuals with large holdings or timber companies or nature conservancies.”

Indeed, perhaps unexpectedly, much of Walters’ funding following the NSF grants for basic research into the woodpeckers’ breeding habits has come from the Department of Defense. Walters has worked with military bases around the southeastern United States on their woodpecker management efforts, including the Camp Lejeune Marine Base in North Carolina, the Fort Liberty Army Base in North Carolina, and the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He has also received support from the USDA Forest Service and USFWS. Beyond the military activities and trainings that are a hallmark of military bases, bases sometimes work with the USFWS to help protect the surrounding lands where they have training exercises.

“Something That has Real Implications”

A recent analysis that Walters co-developed examined the species over a roughly 20-year period and found widespread increases in red-cockaded woodpecker populations. The new practices have been so striking that the federal government has proposed downlisting the woodpeckers from “endangered” to “threatened.” According to The Nature Conservancy, the birds “numbered less than 10,000 individuals in the mid-1990s, and today, there are between 18,000 and 19,000 individuals.”

“This is an example where basic research, without any applied goal, can turn out to produce a paradigm shift on the applied side,” says Walters. “The paradigm shifts that come out of basic research: you can’t predict them. You never know what you’re going to get, but you could learn something that has real applications.”

Walters, now at Virginia Tech, has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters related to conservation, behavioral ecology, and population biology. He has traveled the world studying various species of birds, but the red-cockaded woodpecker remains close to his heart. In recognition of his work, he has won several awards, including the American Ornithologists’ Union’s highest research honor, the Elliott Coues Award, in 2002, for his work with the woodpeckers. The award citation stated, “To no small extent, whatever success is achieved in the conservation of this remarkable species will be due to Walters’ insightful and wide-ranging work.”

By Erin Heath