The Kirtland's Warbler and the Jack Pines of Huron-Manistee

In nineteen seventy-one, a wildlife biologist counted one hundred sixty-seven singing male Kirtland's warblers in the jack pine forests of the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. That number was the lowest ever recorded. The species breeds almost exclusively in young jack pine stands, specifically trees between five and twenty-three years old, where the low branches touch the ground and create nest cover the bird requires. Jack pine is a fire-dependent tree: its cones require intense heat to open and release seed, and without fire the old trees shade out the young growth the warbler needs.

European settlement had suppressed fire across the landscape, and the jack pine stands were aging. The warbler was disappearing. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and the USDA Forest Service launched a recovery program in the Huron-Manistee National Forests that combined prescribed burning and clear-cutting to create and maintain the young-forest habitat the bird requires. It was an intensive and at times counterintuitive intervention: cutting down trees and setting fires to save a songbird.

By two thousand nineteen, the population had risen to around twenty-three hundred singing males. The Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the Kirtland's warbler from the Endangered Species Act that year, making it one of the most significant songbird recoveries in the history of the act. It was the first warbler to be delisted because of recovery rather than extinction.

The Huron-Manistee covers about nine hundred seventy thousand acres in the northern Lower Peninsula, split between the Huron unit on the Lake Huron shore and the Manistee unit on the Lake Michigan shore. The jack pine barrens managed for the warbler on the Huron unit are accessible to birders, and the Fish and Wildlife Service leads guided tours to active nesting areas each spring, one of the few ways to legally enter the nesting zone.