SUSSEX COUNTY, Va. _ On a cloudy day, Rebecca Wilson strolled along a sandy path at a nature preserve brimming with young longleaf pine _ a peculiar tree with long green needles and a taste for fire.
Reaching up to the middle of one, she pulled down a branch and spread some needles. She was eager to show off something special: a handful of purple buds popping up.
These male flowers, she said, are called catkins, which produce large amounts of pollen. It's a sign that Virginia could once again see new native, cone-bearing pines in the coming years.
"It's impossible not to fall in love with longleaf," she said at Chub Sandhill, an agriculture-field-turned-rare-plant paradise teeming with the trees.
"They're just a really cool tree. They do so many cool things. They look cool. They grow in cool places. They have cool plants underneath. They have cool birds in them."
It is clear that even after two decades working on the preserve in Sussex County, the state's longleaf recovery specialist is still enamored with the historic tree.
Integral to Virginia's history, the pine once dominated most of the region.
For decades, though, the longleaf has been struggling to survive in an environment no longer suited for it. The pine, which thrives under regular burn cycles, stopped getting the necessary fire treatment when earlier residents started extinguishing the blazes that would have killed off competition. And timber companies harvested the longleaf until the tree largely vanished.
At the turn of the century, fewer than 200 such mature conifers remained in Virginia.
In turn, the population of red-cockaded woodpeckers plummeted with the loss of that habitat. Now federally endangered, one could just about count the remaining birds in the state on two hands.
But a group of conservationists from multiple agencies are on a mission to save the state's so-called "Founding Forest" and with it, the state's most scarce bird.
