Bear Grease - Ep. 459: Backwoods University - Troops and Wildlife

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Seeing as this episode releases on Memorial Day, Lake thought it would only be fitting to use it as opportunity to honor our the men and women who served the United States armed forces. This week, we will hear four different stories where wildlife conservation and the U.S military just so happened to overlap in some pretty incredible ways. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It supports the work that earns the season. Check out FirstLight's new fieldware collection at firstlight.com. Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wildplaces, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to OnX Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. And today is such a special day. Memorial Day.

A day to honor, a day to mourn, and to show gratitude for the military personnel who have paid the ultimate sacrifice serving this country. A day that's level of importance simply cannot be overstated. And really, on a personal note here, before we even get into today's episode, I just want to say thank you to any military service men or women who might be listening to this show. I just want you to know that I appreciate you.

We all do. And since today is such an important day, I thought it was only fitting that we give it a very special episode. Now, as previously stated in this show, we talk about wild things and wild places, and people who dedicate their lives to conserving those things. Well, in this episode, we're going to hear four different stories of our very own U.S. military when they were directly involved with wildlife conservation. Man, this military of ours, they serve this country selflessly, they keep us protected, and they can serve our wildlife.

They can do anything, and we sure appreciate it. Let's dive into these stories. Story number one, the Woodpecker War. I want to talk to you about one of the strangest, most improbable conservation stories in the history of this country, really. And here's the thing. It happened on a military. military base, a live fire training ground, one of the busiest army installations in the world.

And the whole thing started because of a small bird. I want you to picture Fort Bragg. Now they call it Fort Liberty, sitting in the North Carolina Sand Hills near Fayetteville. 167,000 acres of mostly forested land. 50,000 active duty soldiers, artillery going off across the woods, tracer rounds lighting up the tree lines at night, paratroopers coming down into the clearings. It is, in every sense of the word, a place where things get torn up. And yet, almost entirely by accident, Fort Bragg had become one of the last refuges on earth

for a bird that was slipping away from us, the red cockated woodpecker. Now, here's what you need to understand about this bird if you're going to understand this story, which is important. The red cockated woodpecker has what I would call one of the most demanding real estate requirements in the entire avian world. They almost solely nest in living long-leaf pine trees, and not just any long-leaf pine. Only trees that are older than about 80 years, whose heartwood has been softened by a very specific fungus called red heart disease. Carving out a cavity in the living wood can take this bird anywhere from one to ten years. So just think about that for a second.

One to ten years, just to build a nest. And it's a cooperative breeder, too, meaning that the young birds come back from previous years, and stick around to help their parents raise the next generation. There's a lot going on with this bird, my friends. But here's the problem. The long-leaf pine ecosystem that once blanketed a hundred million acres of the American southeast, stretching from New Jersey all the way down to Florida to Texas, that ecosystem is all but gone, farmed over, subdivided, almost to nothing by the mid-20th century.

And when the trees went, the woodpecker went with it. By 1995, what had once been somewhere around 1.6 million, billion breeding groups before 1910 was down to fewer than 4,000. That's a staggering decrease. That's a species that's essentially on its way out. Fort Bragg had survived all of that almost entirely because the army had claimed the land in 1918 and never let development touch the majority of it. The pines had grown old, and here's the part that really gets to me.

The artillery had accidentally been setting fires for decades. Trace around from machine guns, shells landing in the forest. they were starting low-grade fires that burned through the understory and kept it open. And you know what long-leaf pines need to thrive? Fire. Regular, prescribed fire. Or natural fire. The Army had unknowingly been doing exactly what a land manager would do on purpose,

and the birds figured it out before anyone else did. Then, in the year 1990, things got real in a hurry. U.S. fish and wildlife issued what is called a Jeopardy opinion, A formal finding that the armish training activities were threatening the continued existence of the red cockated woodpecker. And to understand what that means in practical terms, shooting ranges got closed down, training areas had to be completely redesigned, strict limits were placed on how close vehicles and soldiers could operate near parked cavity trees. Some units were temporarily shipped out of the state just to be able to train properly. A senator named Jesse Helms from North Carolina actually called on Congress to try and exempt Fort Bragg from the endangered speech. Act altogether. And the Army was seriously considering going this route. A man named Mike Lynch was

on the leadership team at Fort Bragg at the time, overseeing the training areas. He described the circumstances pretty plainly. He said, we got a jeopardy opinion from fish and wildlife, which basically said that all of our military training had to come to a halt. The relationship between the Army and the conservation community was, to put it kindly, not great. But after several meetings between the two groups, something started to happen. The army started walking the biologist through how soldiers and vehicles actually moved through the forest during training. And the biologist started explaining in real detail what the woodpecker actually needed to survive. And both sides started slowly realizing that they were not as opposed as they had assumed.

Because those fires, the ones the army had been setting by accident all along, were creating the exact conditions that the bird needed, that the woods needed. The military was maintaining habitat that hadn't existed anywhere else in the landscape for decades. That was a huge turning point. The Army partnered with the Nature Conservancy in the mid-1990s, and together they launched what they called the Private Lands Initiative. They started buying parcels of land surrounding the base from willing sellers, creating forested corridors that would connect Fort Bragg's woodpecker population to another large population at Camp McCall, a separate army installation about 70,000 acres away.

A red-cockated woodpecker can't cross a treeless gap much wider than about 200 meters before it gives up. so the land that they were buying from was not random. It was strategic, stitching the habitat back together, gap by gap, and the birds could move and interbreed and survive long term, hopefully. The partnership spent up about $12 million on that effort over a decade. Seven million of that came from the army itself. The results were something that nobody had predicted.

Fort Bragg had entered the 1990s with only a few hundred woodpecker breeding pairs. The recovery goal set by fish and wildlife was 500 pairs. They hit that goal five years ahead of schedule. Five years early. Today, there are somewhere between 18 and 19,000 individual red cockated woodpeckers and the Fort Bragg population is considered to be biologically recovered. In January of 2009, more than 3,100 acres of previously restricted training land were reopened because the bird no longer needed the protection.

And the story doesn't stop at Fort Bragg. The model they built there got replicated across the country. Fort Benning in Georgia, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, just to name a few. The Pentagon spent over a billion dollars on similar conservation partnerships across 30 different states. The Longleaf Pine ecosystem has grown back to over 5 million acres. There was one Fort Bragg official that summed it up as well as anyone could. They said, we're no longer adversaries. It's really just about managing the training lands properly.

If Fort Bragg does that, the red cockated woodpecker, is going to be just fine. Just think about this. A bird the size of your fist. Fighting a bureaucratic battle that most people have never heard of, quietly changing how the entire U.S. military thinks about the land it sits on. That's our first story, my friends, and it's a good one. But we're just getting started.

Story number two, the Battlefield Bird Sanctuary. Now, for this story, we're going to go a long way from North Carolina. out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean to three tiny coral islands that most people associate with one of the most decisive naval battles in American history. Because I want to talk about what happened to those islands after the battle was over. And what happened is something that I think represents one of the most remarkable wildlife conservation stories that we've seen. Midway at all. If you've never looked at a map and found it, the remoteness of this place, it's kind of hard to fully grasp.

It sits at the far northwestern tip of the north-western tip of the island. Hawaiian archipelago, roughly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so remote that it wasn't mapped by a Western sailor until 1859, so remote that it's not technically part of the state of Hawaii, claimed separately for the United States in the year 1856 and in federal hands ever since. Three small coral islands, about 1,500 acres of land in total, surrounded by 580,000 acres of submerged reef and open ocean. Geologically, it's one of the oldest island formations in the entire Hawaiian chain, a volcanic remnant eroding into the sea for 28 million years.

The ancient Hawaiians had a name for it. They called it Pihamanu, which meant the loud den of birds. They named it after what they heard when they first got there, that tells you something about what's always been there. Midway's modern history goes back to 1903 when Teddy Roosevelt placed it under naval control, the same time period that he was building the foundation of what would become the National Park System. The first permanent residents were the commercial Pacific cable company, managing the trans-oceanic telegraph cable that ran through it.

Pan American Airways built a refueling base before its Pacific Clipper Seaplanes in 1935. And then came December 7, 1941, when a Japanese raiding party attacked Midway on the same day Pearl Harbor was bombed. Six months later came the battle at sea. self. Over three days in June of 1942, American forces outmaneuvered a Japanese fleet that had them badly outnumbered and outgun. American dive bombers sank four Japanese fleet carriers, irreplaceable ships, crewed by irreplaceable airmen, and shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in a way that it never recovered from. Most military historians consider it to be a turning

point of the entire Pacific War. And for the next 50 years after that, Midway housed an active naval facility capable of supporting more than 5,000 residents, buildings, bunkers, runways, torpedo shops, barracks, covering two of the three islands. The Navy left in 1993. In 1996, Midway became a National Wildlife Refuge, and in 2000, it was formerly designated in the Battle of Midway National Memorial. Two things, a major military shrine and one of the most important seabird colonies on the planet, coexist on the same ground. Today Midway hosts somewhere around 3 million

individual birds from 21 breeding species. Let's think about this for a second. 3 million birds, 21 different species, on 1,500 acres of land. That is some serious biodiversity my friends. The island also hosts green sea turtles, Hawaiian Monksils, spinner dolphins, and an unusually high density of endemic reef fish. By the end of November each year, nearly every patch of available land on those islands is occupied by a nesting albatross pair. The Hawaiians name this place well, the den of birds indeed. Now, before we wrap this story up, I have to tell you about wisdom, not wisdom the character trait, wisdom the bird, because wisdom is one of the most remarkable

individual animals that you will ever learn about. She's an albatross who was first banded by a biologist named Chandler Robbins back in 1956. She is, as of right now, at least 74 years old. She's outlived the man that banded her, and she's outlived most of the men who fought at midway. Scientists estimate she's flown somewhere around 3.5 million miles in her lifetime. That's insane. She's raised somewhere between 30 and 35 chicks that survived to fledge, and she comes back to the same nest site on the sand island every November. Crazy. But the story I want to close this one with involves a man, not a bird, a Marine sergeant named Edgar Fox, who fought at the Battle of Midway as a young man. In June of 2012, he went back for the 70-year anniversary, and he walked

those islands, past the bunkers, past the rusting machinery of war, and everywhere he looked, he saw birds, he saw albatross, nesting in the shell craters, shuffling along. And he was, shuffling along the old runways, filling the sky in every direction. He looked at all of it, and he's quoted in saying, maybe it's a symbol of an era of peace. He kept coming back year after year until he passed away in 2024. And every year, he would make note that the refuge was a great monument to the people that passed here and that he couldn't think of a better way for it to be used. And I can't think of a better way to wrap this story up than that. Pride month, Toronto. Pride is an opportunity for you to create your own

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fieldware belongs in that routine. Check out FirstLight's new fieldware collection at firstlight.com. Now, on to the next one. Story number three, the bombing range that saved the Fox. This one might be the most dramatic of the bunch, and I mean that.

It comes from a small island off the coast of Southern California, It involves foxes, goats, strikes, and the U.S. Navy Seals. That's quite a plethora, if you ask me. And one of the fastest wildlife recoveries in the history of the Endangered Species Act, so buckle up. San Clemente Island sits about 68 miles southwest of San Diego, the southernmost of the eight California Channel Islands, a long volcanic ridge that looks from the water like a place that means business. The Navy has owned it entirely since the late 1930s,

and they use it quite a bit. Missile tests, amphibious landings, live fire exercises, carrier air wing practice, seal team training, one of the most strategically important training grounds in the entire Pacific Fleet, running around the clock. And it is also quietly the site of one of the most dramatic ecological turnarounds that we've seen in America's conservation history. Before we can fully appreciate what happened here,

we need to understand what this island looked like before the Navy started paying attention to it. because honestly, it's not a pretty picture. Before the Navy acquired San Clemente, ranchers ran livestock on it for decades. Feral goats, several thousand of them. In fact, over 20,000 of them at one point had stripped the native vegetation down to bare hillsides. Now, if you're unaware of what goats can do to a landscape, they basically can turn it into a moonscape. The native plants had evolved on that island found literally nowhere else on Earth were gone from huge portions of their range.

The animals that depended on those plants followed right along. By the 1970s and 1980s, San Clemente Island held one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in California, and almost everything on that list was going in the wrong direction. The San Clemente Island Fox, which is a relatively small subspecies of fox, was down to roughly 300 individuals at its lowest point. The San Clemente Bell Sparrow had 34 known adults in 1984. The San Clemente Lagerhead Shrike, a predatory songbird that impels its prey on thorns like a little butcher. Pretty cool, if you ask me, had fallen to as few as 14 birds between 1982 and 1998.

Certain plants existed in single digits. In fact, there was one species called a bushmallow that was known from exactly one individual plant. If I'm trying to paint the picture here to show that the species, the native species on this small island, were suffering. Now, here's where the story gets complicated, in a way I don't think most people have heard about. The fox was eating strike eggs and nestlings, contributing to the Shrike's decline, and the Shrike had a federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, so for a period in the 1990s, the Navy was actually trapping and killing foxes to protect the Shrike, conservation essentially eating itself.

A legally defensible decision that was nevertheless a painful one, and the public outcry was intense and immediate. The Navy eventually shifted to far more nuanced strategies, such as temporarily relocating foxes during Shrike nesting season and installing electric fencing around strike nest sites, even putting shock collars on foxes to condition them away from Shrike habitat. They were trying to solve a problem that didn't have a clean answer. But here's the foundational fix, the one that made everything else possible. The goats.

Remember those? Well, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for 10,000. 20 years, the Navy systematically removed every feral goat from San Clemente Island. The last one came off in 1991, and when they finished, the land responded. Quite quickly, native shrubs that had been browsed to nubs began to return. Grasses came back. The endemic plants that had been pushed to the fringes started reclaiming terrain that they hadn't occupied in decades.

The island began to return to its original form. Over the following decades, the Navy and the fish and wildlife built one of the more comprehensive multi-species recovery programs that you could ever read about. Scientists and military planners learned to coordinate their schedules around each other. Field surveys happen between live fire exercises, conservation and national security coexisting on the same piece of ground. That's pretty dang cool. In January of 2023, the Navy and Fish and Wildlife announced together that the five San Clemente

Island species were fully recovered and no longer needed ESA protection. The Bell Sparrow, which we mentioned earlier, had climbed from 34 individuals to somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 birds. The island fox and several other plants had been added to the recovered list in prior years as well. The island fox recovery has been called the fastest mammal recovery in the history of the Endangered Species Act, listed and delisted in 12 years time. That's lightning quick. And I bet you if you were to stand in that island in 1980, nobody would have ever thought that any of that was possible. So always remember in the world of conservation, no matter how bleak it may look, all hope is never lost. But I think we have time for one more story before we wrap this up.

So let's get into it. Story number four. Bombs, go for tortoises, and the accidental refuge. For the last story, I want us to zoom out a little bit. Because I think when you look at everything that we talked about on today's episode, there's a bigger picture worth. analyzing for a minute. And to get there, I want to take you to a place in coastal Georgia called the Townsend Bombing Range, because what's happening there is one of the clearest examples I know of a reality that I think is one of the most underappreciated things going on in conservation

in this country right now. About 50 miles inland from the Georgia coast, near a town called Jessup, there's a stretch of land where Marine F-18s, A-10 wardhogs, and Apache helicopters regularly drop thousand-pound bombs and rake the ground with heavy caliber machine gun fire. A lot going on. It's a training facility designed to simulate some of the most violent conditions that modern aerial warfare produces. And it also happens to be, for reasons I'm about to walk through, one of the better places left in the southeastern United States for the gopher tortoise.

Now, if you're from the south, if you spend any time in the woods, especially if you're a turkey hunter, you probably know what a gopher tortoise is. They move slow, which isn't surprising because they're a tortoise. They dig burrows, which is pretty cool. You should Google a picture of one and take a look at their front feet because they're pretty sweet. And they can live for 80 to 90 years, longer than most people. These burrows that they dig can go up to 40 feet into the ground and maintain a stable temperature. And here's the detail I always like to focus on about this animal.

More than 350 other species use these gopher tortoise burrows. The Eastern Indigo snake, the gopher frog, the Florida mouse, there's even been studies showing that Bob White Quail will use these burrows to shelter under. You take the gopher tortoise out and the whole community of species goes along with it. That's what a keystone species looks like in practice. But the gopher tortoise has been in some serious trouble for quite some time now, unfortunately, losing grounds of development, agriculture, and fire suppression across its entire range. it's currently a candidate for federal listing is threatened, declining in almost every landscape where humans have built things or put out fires. It's declining almost everywhere except, and here comes that pattern again, the bombing range.

Because the towns and burns regularly, bombs and cannon fires start fires that sweep through the Long Leaf Pine understory and keep it open. And now, here's what I really want to hold on to, because this is the bigger picture that we've been focusing on this entire time. The Department of Defense manages approximately 27 million acres of land in the United States. Most of the major military bases were established in the early to mid-20th century, before the post-war development wave consumed enormous stretches of the American landscape. And because those lands got locked up early,

because they've been largely off limits to commercial development, farming, drainage for 60, 70, 80 years, they have inadvertently preserved ecosystems that simply don't exist at scale anywhere else. Military bases in this country have a higher density of threatened and endangered plants and animals than any other category of federal land. Think about that. That is a crazy fact. Higher than the national parks even, higher than the national forest. The Department of Defense manages habitat for over 500 federally listed species. That is a crazy, staggering number, my friends. The mechanism is almost absurdly simple. You can't build. You can't build a

a subdivision on a live fire range. You can't drain wetlands inside a restricted military installation, and you can't log timber out of a place where soldiers are training with live ammunition. The same exclusion that the military imposes for reasons of operational security produces as a side effect one of the most comprehensive networks of de facto wildlife refuges in the entire American country. The gopher tortoise, plodining its way across the towns and impact zone, navigating bombs and unexploded shells, it's not there by happenstance. It's not there because somebody planned it.

It's there because the land around it never turned into a parking lot. And it's there because the bombing range is the last long-leaf forest that it's got. And that brings me back to everything we've covered today. The red cockaded woodpecker, the island of birds, the foxes and all the other critters on San Clemente Island, the gopher tortoise. The partnership that has evolved between the conservation community and our American military,

whose core purpose really has nothing to do with wildlife, has turned out to be one of the most consequential conservation arrangements in American history. Pretty cool, right? And the funny thing is, it's not like this was planned. Nobody sat down in a room and designed it. It just happened because the land was there and the need was real. And the people on both sides chose to work together instead of against each other.

And every time they did, something came back from the edge of disaster and good things happen. I think there's a lot to be learned from that. I really do. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece in this country life. It means a whole lot to all of us. And I want to give a special thank you

on this Memorial Day episode to everyone who has served or is currently serving the Armed Forces. Our gratitude is something that cannot be overstated. Sincerely, thank you. We'll see y'all next time. If you do off-season work, you know it beats up gear, scouting, land work, crawling through briar patches, brush, weather, long days.

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