ABSTRACT
For millennia, white-backed woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos) had lived in Finland’s old-growth boreal forests dominated by birch and other deciduous trees before a marked shift took place. The twentieth century brought a steep decline to this species, with numbers dropping by 90 percent since the late 1950s, making this woodpecker the most endangered of our forest birds. In 1994 only eleven nests of this bird were found in the entire country. The situation at this time was even worse for carabid beetles, a subspecies of ground beetles whose numbers had also been in dramatic decline for decades.1
