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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted
Ted Turner and his son Beau aren’t your typical green crusaders—the kid is a hook-and-bullet guy, and dad is hatching plans to sell buffalo burgers as theme food. But together they control 1.8 million acres of prime U.S. ranchland, where they’re unloading a fortune to revive endangered species, revolutionize grazing, and (don’t tell the neighbors) help wolves restake their claim on a wilder, toothier American range.

By Jack Hitt


	Ted Turner's 114,000-acre Flying D Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana

The thing is, there’s this red dot,” says Beau Turner, standing quietly in a long-leaf pine forest on his Avalon Plantation, 25,000 red-clay acres half an hour south of Tallahassee. It’s 6:30 on a late-spring morning, and the humidity is rolling in like a fog; already I regret the hot coffee in my hand. One of our chores today is to band some new woodpecker chicks with Avalon identification, but then the red dot came up and I was anxious to see it. Not much bigger than the head of a pin, the red dot is a nearly Zen idea of nature’s beauty. It sits behind the ear of the male red-cockaded woodpecker, an endangered species that Turner has spent the last four years trying to reintroduce to this land.

“It’s like a bird hickey,” drawls Greg Hagan, a woodpecker specialist and former U.S. Forest Service biologist who bolted to Avalon four years ago to work with Beau. During mating season, the red dot gets shown off to the females, and it pretty much reduces them to shameless tramps. Hagan points to a towering pine, taking note of a shower of splinters catching the light. It’s no red dot, but it’s as close as we’ll get. Following the wood chips up a column of sunshine, I finally see him. A red-cockaded woodpecker pecking away, foraging.

It is a lovely sight, and the work it’s taken to put that bird in the upper story of this forest is critical to understanding why, at 33, Beau Turner is one of the most important conservationists working the land today.

Reintroducing the red-cockaded woodpecker has cost millions of dollars—probably tens of millions, if you consider that the bird is just part of a much larger attempt to restore Avalon’s entire longleaf-pine ecosystem, which is in turn a mere fraction of the projects under Beau’s management. The youngest son of cable magnate and billionaire Ted Turner, Beau is in charge of an unprecedented bid to return almost two million private acres to their original state of biodiversity—bringing bison back to tallgrass prairies, desert bighorn sheep back to New Mexico mountains, and wolves back to great swaths of the Rockies—in an effort to prove that responsible environmental stewardship can pay off, not only in beauty, but in bottom-line profits, a form of enlightened stewardship that Beau calls “holistic land management.”

At Avalon, that translates into a massive program of weeding thousands of acres of invasive tree species and reintroducing the controversial tool of fire to revive the longleaf pine forests that once thrived here. The hope is to establish selective harvesting of the pines in a land-management system that will do it all: make money, permit the Turners to preserve the plantation’s historic use as a quail-hunting spread, and restore these woods to their ancient role as habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker. So the red dot is an emblem of a larger-than-life ambition—the type of thing Americans have come to associate with the Turner name.

RCWs, as birders call red-cockaded woodpeckers, are “persnickety birds,” says Hagan. They prefer to bore holes about 40 feet off the ground in tall, old, longleaf pines. The hole must be precisely 1-7/8 inches in diameter, not a fraction bigger or flying squirrels will climb in and depredate their eggs. And to keep out snakes and other ground predators, they like to peck little holes around the entrance so that the pine leaks its sap, a stubborn whitish glue.

When Hagan got started at Avalon in 1998, he built 40 RCW nesting chambers in his workshop and placed each box in a notch he chainsawed high up in a pine, complete with sap-mimicking white paint stripes. That year, he released ten young RCWs obtained from the Apalachicola National Forest; one pair flew off, but eight stayed, settling into Hagan’s phony nests for a season before building their own. Each year Beau and Hagan have released another ten birds or so; the current population is near 45 birds, stable enough that the woodpeckers are beginning to breed.

“Check this out,” Beau says. He and Hagan are looking at a small video monitor, part of a device Hagan dreamed up. On a long extendable pole, he’s placed a tiny camera, like something David Letterman might fasten to the head of a monkey. He can dip its lens directly into an RCW nest. On screen, two chicks—bald and helpless—tumble over and over each other. Hagan straps a narrow ladder to the trunk of the pine and climbs up in a safety harness, like a telephone man. At the hole, he uses a dental mirror to peer in, and another little device to scoop up the chicks in a tiny sling. He climbs down and carefully places a chick in Beau’s hands. With the banding tool, Hagan marks the bird twice, once with a Fish & Wildlife number and again as an Avalon chick born this year.

“Take a look,” says Beau, holding the little woodpecker in cupped hands. The bird is curious to behold, but so is the man. Beau’s a boyish-looking adult, with a kid’s flop of hair betrayed only by a few gray strands. His smile is wide and friendly. He’s standing upright (and he’s a good six-foot-three), reminding me not of his father but of Teddy Roosevelt in one of those vintage pictures of him beside a dead bull elephant, chest out, his smile wild with a primal Darwinian pleasure. Beau is holding a new kind of trophy animal, appropriate to this age: a blind, rubbery, neonatal chick with pin feathers, about two inches long, alive.

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