WASHINGTON — The nation’s biggest forest products company won a government promise Thursday not to interfere with its timber harvesting as long as the company protects an endangered woodpecker living in its trees.

Georgia-Pacific Corp. and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced agreement on the company’s efforts help to save the red-cockaded woodpecker from extinction in four southern states.

In the first-of-a-kind agreement between the government and a private landowner, Georgia-Pacific promised to locate and mark woodpeckers on its land, keep buffer zones around the pine trees where the birds reside, provide adequate foraging habitat and prevent road building in their area.

Georgia-Pacific owns more than 4 million acres of southern timberland, of which 56,000 acres have been identified as habitat for the eight-inch birds in Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi.

The company’s president, Peter Correll, said Thursday logging would likely still continue to some extent on three-fourths of that acreage without harming the bird.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said the arrangement involved “an extraordinary degree of cooperation” and set a precedent in the administration’s efforts to avoid the kind of stalemate between environmentalists, government and loggers that exists in the Northwest forest habitat of the threatened spotted owl.