calsfoundation@cals.org
October 13, 1970
The red-cockaded woodpecker was designated as endangered. With the exception of the recently rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker (in 2004), red-cockaded woodpeckers are the rarest of Arkansas’s nesting woodpeckers. Arkansas’s best opportunity for recovery of the red-cockaded woodpecker involves the USDA Forest Service’s Pine-Bluestem Project on more than 200,000 acres of the Ouachita National Forest in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. While many Arkansas populations have continued to decline, efforts on the Ouachita National Forest have led to a slow recovery. From thirty-two birds in 1990, the population was at least eighty-seven by 2005.