Groups Call to Halt Removal of Protections for Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers

Note: Original content appeared on the Southern Environmental Law Center website.

Shortly after President Biden took office, his administration released an executive order directing agencies to engage in science-based decision-making and to reconsider decisions from the past four years that are inconsistent with science and protecting our environment. The Southern Environmental Law Center, in conjunction with Defenders of Wildlife, sent a letter to the Fish and Wildlife Service calling on the agency to halt its efforts to remove protections for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

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Martjan Lammertink/USFS

This letter supplements an initial set of comments filed in December 2020 on behalf of a broad coalition of conservation groups detailing concerns with the agency’s proposed downlisting of the species from endangered to threatened. Those initial comments highlighted how a variety of climate change impacts threaten the species—including increasingly frequent and more severe storm events. The new letter builds on those concerns, showcasing how the red-cockaded woodpecker also faces significant habitat loss due to warming temperatures.

The latest comments explain how the agency has failed to account for these climate change-caused threats to the species, as well as noting how agency policies contrary to science-based decisionmaking may have influenced the proposal—including the Southeastern Region of FWS’s goal to delist, downlist, or preclude the need for listing 30 species per year.

This quota system, known as the WIG or “wildly important goal,” incentivizes decisions on species statuses based on meeting an arbitrary quota rather than evaluating a species’ status using the best available science, as required under the Endangered Species Act.