On the verge of a happy ending, concerns raised about future of rare southern bird

It’s still dark out when wildlife researchers at Fort Stewart start their day. Crickets and frogs chirp in the muggy early morning; the mosquitoes are terrible. Stepping out of their pickup parked on a dirt road, the researchers – one in a Georgia baseball hat, the other in a camo Alabama cap — close their doors gently, to keep quiet

Before dawn, deep in the woods, it’s the kind of time one might feel like whispering anyway, but they whisper so as not to wake the woodpeckers sleeping nearby.

“As you start approaching the tree, you try to be as quiet as you can,” says Georgia fan Tommy Holland, a wildlife biologist at Fort Stewart.