09-28-04

George Bush must go! His administration is once again pushing to “de-list” endangered species, this time the Gray Wolf and Grizzly Bear. This would, of course, effectively eliminate the protection the two species have enjoyed since 1973 when the Endangered Species Act was passed.

Why is this happening? These animals are still rare and far below their original numbers. The two predatory mammals have, however, experienced something of a rebound since 1973, thanks to ESA, and the current situation is such that small pockets of their former ranges have slowly regained what could be construed as healthy populations. Historically though, the animals’ ranges have been vast and nearly all northern states enjoyed numbers of both. Since the turn of the century however, the numbers have fallen so drastically that the animals were all but extinct in the lower 48 states by the 1970s. Now, if I'm not mistaken, only two or three states have any at all. The cause of the decline was obviously loss of habitat and persecution by humans. No one seems to like a carnivore in their neighborhood... Does these sound like a good candidates for de-listing?

Let's go back 30 years. Enter the Endangered Species Act. Large areas, deemed crucial to the recovery of particular species were protected from development and hunting while simultaneously plans were made for a long-term reintroduction projects. Humans had done something noble – they had decided that another organism needed space and were making efforts to preserve lands. Populations began to crawl up from zero. Ecologists were encouraged. Perhaps there was hope for the remaining animals after all.

But now the Grizzly Bear and Gray Wolf have been deemed “in sufficient numbers” and therefore “recovered” by Washington. They no longer need protection apparently. The problem is more complex than politicians think however. How, for example, does one define a healthy population? Is it simply a "head count" of wolves or bears in an area? While numbers are indeed up from 30 years ago, they hardly qualify as full recoveries and the species are certainly far from out of danger. Their former ranges were far larger than they are now and the total number of wolves and bears is still down by many hundreds. The headcount approach also makes no allowance for the health of the larger eco-community and tends to create giant, outdoor zoos where animals become safe, but isolated in "forest islands". While their numbers may be up in these areas, all around them valuable national forest is targeted for development or logging. To remove the Endangered Species status that protected the two animals and their habitat will put them in danger all over again. But if by some miracle their numbers remain stable after the endangered status is removed we should not consider it evidence that they are safe. They deserve continued protection and large enough areas to fully recover their original numbers.

The Bush administration, I fear, is not sophisticated enought to understand the complexities of conservation.
Animals and plants do, after all, exist in highly complex ecological groups. With the apparent extinction of these predators, populations of deer have exploded, causing a chain reaction that begins with the loss of foliage in the under story of the forest, continues with the failure of an area to provide suitable habitat for nesting or migrating birds and could be shown to have an effect on insect populations or even top soil conditions. To say that the two mammals have rebounded enough to deny them the protection they have had for 30 years is naive at best. The rest of the community depends on a return balance, not simply a few representatives of a species.

With policy decisions like this, one has to question the motivation of the source. We have already witnessed the Bush administration's preference for industrial development and financial gain over the environment, which has not so subtly out-voiced any lip service he may have given to conservation. Isn’t anyone thinking about the environment in Washington? All I hear is arguments about why we should drill for oil and cut down old growth forests in protected area. It sounds to me like politicians simply want development to pickup where it left off and industry to go on polluting with as little “red tape” as possible. With the overturning of the Clinton-era "roadless rule" for National Forests and his continued efforts to eliminate the endangered species status of species like Spotted Owl, Marbled Murrelet, Gray Wolf and Grizzly Bear a pattern becomes clear. With each judgement like this, the safety wall built around these precious animals and the irreplaceable forests that they need is removed, stone by stone... This reckless environmental policy must be voted out of Washington.

09-19-04

How embarrassing! Cricket and I found what we thought was a Brandt's Cormorant at Shoreline Lake this afternoon. We were pretty excited! The bird we saw was distinctly smaller headed and darker than the immature Double-crests also present on the lake. There appeared to be some slightly paler grayish tan coloration on the lower neck area, but the general impression was uniformly dark compared to the other birds. There was no orangey-yellow skin around the face and the bill was thinner and less hooked. We found the bird at the western end of the lake, but it moved closer to the center and fed actively for about 10 minutes and was a little hard to get a good look at. Eventually it took flight, landing closer to the golf course and behind the island from where we stood. We did not pursue it after that, but it may have remained after we left. As it flew, it held its neck more straightly than a Double-crest, but still had a slight jerk in the neck. The head appeared larger and heavier than the neck, but again, much less-so than a Double-crest...

I posted a report to SBB saying basically what I said above, and even posted some Loch Ness Monster-esque images for people to review. Well, the responses came back pretty quickly. What we actually had seen was a Pelagic Cormorant! A Pelagic Cormorant on the lake is indeed an uncommon thing indeed and I guess we should feel lucky to have found it. I just wish we had gotten the identification right. Oh, well...

09-18-04

I don't normally duplicate class field trip results in the news section, but I'll make an exception in this case since it refers to a few recently reported rare birds in the area. After the official class trip to Sunnyvale Water Pollution Control Plant (SWPCP), many of us chose to make a stop at the intersection of State and Spreckles in Alviso. There we scanned the shallow pools for some of the recently reported rareties. We found no Stilt Sandpiper, but after some searching both Ruff and Pectoral Sandpiper were spotted and well seen by all. I managed to get some digiscope images of the Ruff, which I have posted in the gallery section of this site. Other birds found here (and along the train tracks) that were new for the day were two Wilson’s Phalarope, Short-billed and Long-billed Dowitchers, Lesser Yellowlegs, Western Sandpiper, Black-bellied Plover and Burrowing Owl (thanks to Ashutosh!)

Finally, before heading home for lunch, Cricket, and I stopped at the Alviso Marina to find the Greater Roadrunner. She located it within a minute or two as it walked slowly along the edge of the pavement. When I joined her, the bird had disappeared into a large bush bordering the parking area. We waited, and soon Leonie Batkin joined us and we waited some more. Finally, all three of us got looks as the bird perched silently and became visible through a small gap in the branches. It wasn’t the best view in the world, but at least we saw it, the famous Alviso Roadrunner. Quite cool!

09-14-04

I wish I could remember exactly where I got this image and the accompanying caption... I'm just glad it isn't this difficult to "sex" human beings. Can you imagine... The caption was as follows:

"Sexing waterfowl: Once the cloaca is gently spread open, the sex of the waterfowl is easily determined..."

09-14-04

Once again, the Bush administration has demonstrated its knack for finding new ways to insult the environment. This article, published today in the New York times provides more fuel for the fire (I hope it's ok for me to include the article below. I do not take credit for the article and am including a link to NYTimes.com in good faith):

New Priorities in Environment

September 14, 2004
By FELICITY BARRINGER

Every fall, after raising their young near Teshekpuk Lake and the Colville River, tens of thousands of geese and tundra swans leave the North Slope of Alaska for more southerly shores. Some end their journey at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in the flatlands of North Carolina.

Both habitats could be transformed if current Bush administration initiatives come to pass. The birds would have oil rigs as neighbors in Alaska and be greeted by Navy jets simulating carrier takeoffs and landings in North Carolina.

That such projects could bracket the birds' path is not surprising in light of the priorities of the administration. Over the last three and a half years, federal officials have accelerated resource development on public lands. They have also pushed to eliminate regulatory hurdles for military and industrial projects.

From the start, Bush officials challenged the status quo and revised the traditional public-policy calculus on environmental decisions. They put an instant hold on many Clinton administration regulations, and the debates over those issues and others are intensely polarized.

The administration has sought to increase the harvesting of energy and other resources on public lands, to seek cooperative ways to reduce pollution, to free the military from environmental restrictions and to streamline - opponents say gut - regulatory and enforcement processes.

In a recent interview, Michael O. Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, summed up the Bush administration's philosophy. "There is no environmental progress without economic prosperity," Mr. Leavitt said. "Once our competitiveness erodes, our capacity to make environmental gains is gone. There is nothing that promotes pollution like poverty."

The administration's approach has provoked a passionate response. Asked about his expectations in the event of President Bush's re-election, Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote in an e-mail message: "I expect the Bush administration to continue their assault on regulations designed to protect public health and the environment. I expect the Bush administration to continue underfunding compliance and enforcement activities."

Mr. Jeffords concluded, "I expect the Bush administration will go down in history as the greatest disaster for public health and the environment in the history of the United States."

For many environmental groups, Mr. Bush's legacy was assured in his first year, thanks to highly publicized decisions that effectively repudiated Clinton administration positions. Mr. Bush backed off a campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide and abandoned the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. Then the administration pushed, unsuccessfully, for a law allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It scrapped the phaseout of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and briefly dropped a Clinton proposal to cut the permissible level of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent.

The cumulative effect was striking. The decisions sought to reverse environmental action for which there was broad support. Polls by The New York Times in mid-2001 and late 2002 consistently showed public opposition to drilling in the Arctic refuge. A CBS poll in the same period showed that, by ratios of better than two to one, those polled said that environmental protection was more important than energy production.

The outcry ensured that some Bush administration initiatives favorable to the cause of environmental groups received little notice. They include the E.P.A.'s decision to force General Electric to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remove PCB's in the Hudson River, a cleanup that has been delayed; legislation speeding the cleanup of urban industrial sites known as brownfields; increases in financing for private land set aside for conservation of animals and their habitats; and the first limits for diesel emissions in trucks and off-road vehicles.

The diesel regulations, said James F. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would have as much impact on air quality as the rules that eliminated leaded gasoline. The clamor over the reversals, he said, "grossly overshadowed the accomplishments, which in scope and scale were of far greater consequence to environmental protection and natural resource conservation than anything people were complaining about."

The administration contends that free markets often provide the best solution to pollution. That belief underlies regulatory proposals to allow power plants that exceed their goals in reducing pollutants to sell cleanup credits to plants that fall short.

The failed "Clear Skies" act, incorporating this approach, was in many ways reborn in a pending regulation that Bush officials say would offer significant pollution reductions and that critics dismiss as a retreat from the mandates of the Clean Air Act.

Mr. Leavitt called the reasoning simple. "Rather than spend decades and millions litigating" to ensure power plants' compliance one at a time, "let's require everyone to do it essentially at the same time," he said. "And create incentives for them to do more as opposed to incentives to try to avoid."

Mr. Jeffords countered, "The relaxed Bush approach will produce more illness, disease and premature deaths than simply putting the federal government's full resources into achieving compliance with the Clean Air Act and pushing the development of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation."

The recent proposals for Alaska and North Carolina reflect some of the themes of the administration's overhaul of environmental policies.

In 1998, Bruce Babbitt, President Bill Clinton's interior secretary, opened to oil drilling four million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. That is 87 percent of the landmass of the reserve's northeast quadrant. The 580,000 acres held back, including Teshekpuk Lake, were considered crucial wetlands habitat for molting and nesting fowl - swans, geese, peregrine falcons and other species - and for caribou and the hunters who live off them. But geological surveys show that large volumes of oil lie beneath much of that area. In June, the Interior Department proposed opening the lake and most of the remaining acreage to drilling, because, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said recently, "that's where the resource is."

Well before that proposal, a panel of the National Research Council, a private, nonprofit institution, issued a mixed report on the cumulative effects of 40 years of oil development on the North Slope. Bird populations, it found, dwindled as the numbers of predators like foxes and brown bears grew unnaturally large. The predators were drawn to the area by oil-field garbage.

Edward Porter, research manager for the American Petroleum Institute, said the situation was unlikely to recur around Teshekpuk Lake because the exploration envisioned would have few permanent facilities.

At the birds' other way station, in North Carolina, the prospective disturbances would be the latest F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet jet fighters, which would touch down and take off from a new airfield 31,650 times each year.

A Fish and Wildlife Service advisory in March raised concern; the noise of a jet taking off is two to four times greater than the level that startles such birds into flight. During their winter sojourn, the birds accumulate the fat that fuels their next migration. The more jets startle them into flight, the more they burn fat needed for the journey.

The Navy's review concluded that the birds "would not be affected." Navy officers also argued that the risk of collisions between birds and planes - which is estimated to be higher than at any other airfield in the country - could be mitigated.

When local North Carolinians and the Audubon Society went to court to block the project, the administration closed ranks, and the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Fish and Wildlife Service, supported the Navy. A United States District Court judge has temporarily blocked the Navy from proceeding.

In many ways, the issues in the birds' neighborhoods speak to the aims, tactics and results of the Bush environmental strategy as much as the better-known inventory of decisions, like the scuttling of the Clinton ban on new roads in 58.5 million acres of roadless national forests.

Environmentalists, for example, accuse the administration of trying to pressure or ignore its scientists, from those of the Pocosin biologists in North Carolina to Environmental Protection Agency scientists working on global warming. In several instances at the agency and at the Fish and Wildlife Service, political appointees aggressively policed agency scientific work that could form the basis of new regulations.

Administration officials, some of whom were lobbyists for the industries they now regulate, say the crucial factors in their thinking are scientific rigor and economic logic. Such priorities were cited in the proposal to expand drilling in Alaska.

The effort to offer the set-aside section of the Alaska petroleum reserve for leasing parallels moves across the West. Bureau of Land Management offices and their land-use plans have been re-engineered to streamline leasing and drilling decisions. From the beginning of the fiscal year, the number of drilling permits has increased to 5,222, the bureau reported. If that pace continues, the annual total will be more than 50 percent higher than the average in the previous three years.

Ms. Norton says that "less than one percent of the surface acres of the Bureau of Land Management have any disturbance for oil and gas production." With new safeguards for wildlife and technologies allowing several wells to branch underground from one well pad, both energy and environmental needs can be satisfied, she said.

The means by which energy development accelerated, like the revamping of land-use planning guidelines, is pretty dry stuff. So are procedural questions; for example, when a local office should clear decisions with headquarters. In the Bush years, officials have relied more on less-visible administrative action than on legislation to advance their agenda. For instance, local Army Corps of Engineers offices have been instructed to check with headquarters before taking jurisdiction over wetlands slated for development, a process that critics say discourages wetlands protection.

The administration had developed a draft proposal to curtail federal wetlands jurisdiction but had to back off after it was disclosed last fall and conservative hunters and fishermen blanched. At a White House meeting, leaders of fishing and hunting groups argued that the plan would degrade large tracts of wetlands and diminish nearby wildlife. Mr. Leavitt quickly repudiated the draft. Last Earth Day, President Bush, standing by salt marshes in Maine, called for a net gain in wetland acreage.

Last fall, Mr. Leavitt, the former governor of Utah, took over from Christie Whitman. She had resigned as E.P.A. administrator after two years as what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called a "wind dummy" - a reference to the buffeting she took for the administration's unpopular initiatives.

The portfolio of issues Mr. Leavitt inherited is not in the same stage it was in in January 2001, at the start of the Bush administration. Many of the administration's environmental policies have laid a foundation for more comprehensive actions in a second term. Critics are convinced that efforts to increase oil and gas drilling on federal lands will accelerate, as will efforts to change laws like the Endangered Species Act.

Ms. Norton acknowledged that the issue of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example, would resurface because "that it is our largest prospect for onshore oil." She added, "There will be extensive environmental protections."

Asked if she would have done anything different in the last few years, she said: "I would have spent more time talking about our successes. Because we've accomplished a lot more than we've ever gotten credit for."