Bees arrive at their nest in a tree cavity created and long since abandoned by a black woodpecker. For those first few days of the siege, the honeybees appeared helpless in the face of the hornet ...
At one point in the 1970s, the red-cockaded woodpecker population had dipped as low as 1,470 clusters — or groups of nests, wildlife officials said. Today, there are an estimated 7,800 clusters.
While other woodpeckers excavate cavities in dead trees, red-cockaded woodpeckers bore holes for nests solely in living pine trees that are generally 60-80 years old. Unfortunately, long-leaf pine ...