Resort, Woodpeckers Thriving

BY MATTHEW MORIARTY: Staff Writer, The Pilot

The commitment of Pinehurst Resort to maintaining the natural beauty of the Sandhills is one of the reasons it was able to land the U.S. Open in 1999.

Now that the Open is coming back in just a few short weeks, thousands of new visitors to the area are going to get to see what makes the Sandhills so special.

Perhaps, during the championship, a tense moment will occur. U.S. Open employees will hold up signs that call for quiet. The crowd will hush as the golfer lines up an important putt. At that point, when everything slows down, you might be able to hear off in the distance the tap-tap-tap of a red-cockaded woodpecker.

That woodpecker might not be here without the support of Pinehurst and several agencies that developed a landmark program.

Ten years ago, Pinehurst took a gamble on a program designed to protect the red-cockaded woodpecker when it became the first landowner to enroll in the Safe Harbor.

During those 10 years, Safe Harbor has grown to include 3.5 million acres of land and 16 miles of streams.

There are Safe Harbor programs in 17 states that protect 35 endangered species. The species include 13 birds, seven fish, four amphibians, three mussels, three mammals, three butterflies and two plants.

“It’s not just for the birds,” said Ralph Costa, coordinator of red-cockaded woodpecker recovery with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Safe Harbor has become the model program for uniting environmental protection and landowners.

In the Dogwood Room at the Carolina Hotel Friday, representatives from Environmental Defense and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service presented Pinehurst Resort with an award commemorating the 10th anniversary of the resort becoming the first landowner in the country to enter into a Safe Harbor agreement.

“It’s often said that a journey of 10,000 miles begins with one step,” said Michael Bean, the wildlife chairman for Environmental Defense. “Ten years ago, Pinehurst Resort took that first step. And many others have followed.”

Costa presented Pinehurst with a numbered print done by a local artist. It features two of the birds about to alight on the side of a tree. The print is framed with

longleaf pine wood.

Janeen Driscoll, communications director for Pinehurst Resort, said that the resort has always been committed to retaining the natural ambience of the area.

“We are an active steward of the land we occupy,” she said.

Since Pinehurst signed on, 326 other landowners have enrolled. Bean pointed out that Safe Harbor programs have helped endangered species such as the Texas northern alomado falcon and the nene, the state bird of Hawaii.

In the case of the nene, also known as the Hawaiian goose, the birds have been reintroduced to the island of Molokai. It’s speculated that those birds have been absent from Molokai since the arrival of Captain James Cook, Bean said.

At the time Pinehurst signed up for the Safe Harbor program, there was a lot of conflict between landowners and the Endangered Species Act.

It was not in most property owners’ interests to discover an endangered species had taken to living on their land. It meant that the government would heap a load of regulations on the land, preventing the owner from using it.

People didn’t like being told what they could or couldn’t do on their land.

Researchers from N.C. State found that the closer people lived to red-cockaded woodpeckers, the more likely they were to have their trees cut down, Costa said.

Safe Harbor solved that problem by taking what had been a negative and turning it into a positive.

“We had to get rid of the disincentive,” he said. “It was a common-sense approach. ... It went from more is worse to more is fine. In fact, people actually want them.

“They just don’t want added regulation. That’s why it’s a common sense approach.”

There was nothing like it at the time, and it took the work of some real visionaries to figure out how to fit the square peg in the round hole.

Bean, Costa and representatives from the Sandhills Area Land Trust such as Marsh Smith worked hard to bring Safe Harbor to life. Now, a decade later, the results don’t lie.

There are 500 groups of red-cockaded woodpeckers on Safe Harbor lands. Fifty of the groups are new. Seven of the 50 are in the Sandhills, Bean said.

Costa said that is “just incredible.”

Bob Farren, grounds and golf course manager for Pinehurst, accepted the award on behalf of the resort. He told the audience how proud the resort is to be the first landowner involved in the initiative.

“We had no idea it would grow to 3.5 million acres,” he said.

Safe Harbor has given hope to other people trying to save endangered species that there is a way to make ecological conservation an economically attractive goal.

A release announcing the re-discovery last month of the once thought extinct ivory-billed woodpecker mentioned Safe Harbor three times, Bean said.

Still, even for those involved in Safe Harbor at its genesis, they couldn’t know it would one day become as big as it is now.

“Certainly the hope was there,” Bean said. “Pinehurst stepped forward first and broke the ice.”