sunday times: condors, woodpeckers, and hope

Endangered species programs are built on a common foundation: hope.  Hope is a powerful thing.  It can motivate us to accomplish great things against long odds.  But it can also mire us with blind faith, prompting us into decisions with little basis in rational fact.  We need to have the perspective to stay on the right side of this thin line of hope.

Here is an example of what hope can do.

I received the following from a friend who attended the AOU meeting in Santa Barbara.  While everyone is in a dither over Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, something serious is going on with another struggling endangered species, the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus). 

"There's grave concern about the viability of both the California and Arizona populations. The birds are picking up gut-fulls of microtrash -- bottle caps, pull-tabs, coins, etc. -- and worse, they're ingesting huge amounts of lead, all of it from lead bullets and shot (you should have seen the x-ray images of the 'snowstorm' of lead fragments that remain in a carcass through which a bullet has passed cleanly), and are being kept alive only because of chelation, and in many cases, multiple chelations. Some condors have been chelated five or six times. And no one knows what effect even one chelation has on a bird, although everyone agrees repeatedly capturing, testing, chelating, and releasing the birds isn't a viable long-term strategy. Yet that's what they're doing, have been doing."

The lead being ingested by condors is from primarily lead shot they are consuming in carrion left by hunters, despite game officials being reluctant to accept that fact. Lead contamination is also a big problem for eagles and various species of waterfowl.

The condor recovery program has been a long and difficult journey.  Being able to release condors in the wild, and into the Grand Canyon, has been considered a great achievement.  Here we are at another stumbling block.  Overcoming this challenge will require a lot of cooperation from the public, and a lot of money.

As of 2003, the latest figures available, California Condors received about 4% of the federal monies going to endangered bird species.  The bird receiving the most was the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis) which at about $10.8 million got about 13%.  Another five species get an additional 41% of the funding, leaving less than half the pot to be divvied up among the nearly 90 bird species remaining on the list of threatened and endangered species in the country. 

This was before the reported rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  As you might recall, over $10 million in federal funds has been earmarked for the Ivory-bill, catapulting it to near the top of the heap.  First of all, this money is not new money, it has to be money that is being re-allocated from other species and programs.  With so many species -- which everybody agrees actually exist -- urgently needing triage, I once again wonder at the wisdom of rushing in to throw money at the Ivory-bill.

I'm thrilled habitat is being saved in the name of helping Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.  But in light of the fact that even Cornell seems to be backpedaling a little on their conviction that the audio evidence that changed the minds of skeptics is actually conclusive, perhaps we need to do a little re-evaluating.

We've invested a huge amount of money and effort into condor restoration, and achieved a good measure of success and learned a great many lessons.  To see any of this effort falter because of funding being channeled away -- from a sure thing to a questionable or ambiguous thing -- would be a real loss and a serious misstep for our endangered species program.

We hope that both condors and woodpeckers can once again have viable populations and safe habitats. We must also hope for the wisdom to effectively achieve this goal.

More resources:

• Report on condor lead exposure from condor recovery team
• Arizona Game Commission condor and lead web site
• USFWS condor and lead web site
• Ventana Wilderness Society
• The California Condor: A Saga of Natural History and Conservation, by Noel and Helen Snyder
• Audubon article on Project Gutpile, lead-safe hunting
• Info on lead vs. non-toxic shot -- I'm not a hunter, so I didn't understand what the big resistance was to switching to non-toxic shot.

Comments

[Daniel]

What is the basis for distributing the federal money intended for restoration of endangered species?

I would think it's based upon a combination of just how low a species numbers are, the cost of proposed protection activities, and how much can be accomplished with the investment.

No doubt more money is needed than is currently allocated, but I wonder if what you suggest, that money is earmarked for certain species purely on political grounds, is exclusively the case. I sure hope not.

[nuthatch]

I have never seen any type of "formula" applied to endangered species funding. I imagine it's much like any other type of federal funding allocation, influenced by the squeaky wheel syndrome. Clearly it does not have to do with populations or recovery probabilities, or there would not be so much money going towards appealing, charismatic species -- despite the herculean efforts often needed to continue to manage them -- and so little towards those lower on the food chain (literally).

[Alan]

Clearly, the more charismatic a species is, the more money goes toward its recovery program. But we're missing much bigger picture here. If the public deserves (through its elected government) believes in saving a species in the ICU, it will ensure commensurate levels of funding. Ah, but that's the best-case book, which is absolutely unreachable, especially in the current climate of tax cuts for the rich. But even that misses the biggest picture. Society would, it appears, care much more to throw money at such things as new infrastructure. An example: $140M for the new stretch of I-99 in central Pennsylvania, built atop a ridge that formerly was unbroken, unfragmented forest. The new highway wins out, scarlet tanagers lose.