Diehards will fork out as much as $75 to hop on buses at 5 a.m. this week to peep at tree holes in hopes of a glimpse at one of North America’s rarest woodpeckers.

The endangered red-cockaded woodpecker can’t match the mystique of the ivory billed woodpecker, believed extinct since the 1940s. But the elusive creature, a featured fowl of this week’s Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, still inspires awe among the scope-bearing flock. They’re a prized addition to bird lovers’ lifetime lists of species they’ve seen.

Birders will stake out trees before the first woodpecker cheeps for a chance to see this tiny attraction — always a huge hit at the nation’s largest birding event.

“The birders would be very happy to get a red-cockaded,” said Ned Steel, who runs Audubon’s Christmas Bird Counts at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. “There’s nothing spectacular about them. They just look like a little woodpecker.”

But the bird’s rarity and the crucial niche its holes carve in nature is why the red-cockaded woodpecker remains a cherished species for birders and biologists to behold. Flying squirrels, several species of reptiles and amphibians, and insects — mostly bees and wasps — take refuge in the cavities this “primary excavator” pecks into pines. Larger woodpeckers take over the cavities, sometimes enlarging the hole enough to allow screech owls, wood ducks, even raccoons to move in.

And the good news for birders: This woodpecker, considered an indicator of healthy pine forests, has been on the mend in recent years.

“It’s what we would call a keystone species for the cavity nesting species,” Reed Bowman, a research biologist with the Archbold Biological Station in Venus, Fla., who’s studied the species.

“I think in most places in Florida, the populations have been increasing,” Bowman said. “They are definitely improving in recent years on public lands. I would consider them better off than Florida scrub jays right now.”

That means more woodpeckers around to perform a welcome ecological service to man: They gobble up enormous amounts of ants, biologists say, not to mention larvae of wood-borne beetles.

Biologists estimate 4,500 groups of red-cockaded woodpeckers remain, with up to 12,000 birds. Florida’s population is estimated at 1,100 nesting pairs. The bird used to live throughout much of the eastern United States. But they’ve died out in New Jersey, Maryland, Tennessee and Missouri, prompting the the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep them listed as endangered since 1970.

While relocation efforts and habitat restoration improved the bird’s lot in recent years, federal officials have no immediate plans to change its endangered status.

The rarity of seeing them gets birders up early and willing to pay. For $50, birders can take bus tours today and tomorrow to track down the woodpecker and others. They’ll stop first at the 22,000-acre St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park, where nine families of red-cockaded woodpeckers live.

For $75, birders can join tours Friday and Saturday that start at Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area in the Kissimmee Prairie, one of the largest remaining expanses of dry prairie in the nation.

“It’s a difficult bird to find because of very low densities, very fragmented habitat,” said James Currie, who hosts “Nikon’s Birding Adventures” on NBC Sports and the National Geographic show “Aerial Assassins.” He’ll film a show during the festival to air on NBC. And on Saturday , he’ll lead a tour to search for the woodpecker on St. Johns River Water Management district lands along the border of Orange and Brevard counties.

“They’re not particularly shy,” he said of spying the woodpecker. “The key is to get there at dawn,” Currie said. “They kind of stick their head out of the hole in the morning, check that everything’s safe, and take their time to come out.”

The red-cockaded woodpecker’s decline followed the demise of old-growth pine forests in the Southeast. Loggers and developers cut pines down, and humans suppressed the natural fires that kept forests healthy.

This is the only woodpecker that taps its cavity into living pine trees. But the trees must be old enough — usually 80 to 100 years — to be infected with a fungus that softens the tree enough for the diminutive woodpecker to carve its cavities.

Biologists relocate the woodpeckers from fragmented habitats to healthier forests and restore natural pine forests through prescribed fires. They also drill holes in pines to help the woodpecker along. Trees are marked and the holes are reinforced so no other cavity-nesting birds can take over and forge larger holes.

“I think the prospects are good for the bird,” Currie said. “I think it’s one of those we’ve managed to save.”