[Pollinator] Fw: Fighting to protect protections

[Laurie Davies Adams]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Scott Black 
To: Scott Black 
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 7:50 AM
Subject: Fighting to protect protections


Fighting to protect protections

Some see threat to Endangered Species Act 

By:   CHELSEA CONABOY 

Concord Monitor

Five years ago, the Karner blue butterfly had all but disappeared from the pine barrens in Concord. 

"The numbers were so small, to find one would have been to find a needle in a haystack," said Steve Fuller, a biologist with Fish and Game. 

Biologists transplanted eggs from New York, where the species thrived, to Concord. Today, the population is flourishing with more than 1,350 feeding on the wild lupine, which thrives in the sandy pine barren habitat. Similar stories have been repeated with many plants, animals and insects listed as endangered. 

Now environmental groups worry that the provisions in the 32-year-old Endangered Species Act, which made projects like the Karner blue recovery successful, may themselves be endangered. 

In May, the U.S. House resources committee released a report on the successes and failures of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, noting more failures than successes and calling for reforms. The report called for changes to the way species are classified and pressed the oversight agencies to improve money management proceedures. 

In July, a 73-page draft of a bill sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the House resources committee, was released to The New York Times and other media outlets. Pombo, a California Republican, has proposed multiple amendments to the act during his seven terms in office. 

Environmental groups say these new changes would all but repeal the act, committing the government only to protecting those populations that are still naturally existing. It would not make provision for recovering lost populations like Concord's Karner blue butterfly. It would protect only those habitats needed to conserve existing plants and animals, but would not provide for buffer zones or for wider protections of land as "growing room" for endangered species. A final bill proposal is expected after Labor Day. 

New Hampshire now has 12 species federally listed as endangered or threatened. All of them have a recovery plan that includes the protection of habitat beyond the species'current range, said Rick Van de Poll, a wildlife biologist, who helped inventory the pine barrens in 1986 when he worked with the New Hampshire Natural Heritage Bureau. 

Van de Poll said the proposed Pombo bill approaches wildlife protection as if what is on the planet now is all that needs to be here. It instructs biologists to look at an endangered population and say, "This is the only population (of this species) we need to protect in perpetuity," he said. 

National farming and ranching groups, such as the Partnership for the West, are speaking out in favor of the proposed changes, saying the law often stands in the way of property owners'fair use of their land. But few in New Hampshire are vocal in support of the Pombo bill. 

Rob Johnson, executive director of the New Hampshire Farm Bureau Federation called the original intent of the Endangered Species Act "good and laudable," but said he would favor revisions to the bill that would give the government less control over private property and create more assurances that farmers would be fully compensated when their land is restricted for species conservation. However, Johnson said, he hasn't heard any notable complaints from farmers in this state. 

In what could be New Hampshire's industry equivalent to ranching in the West, the timber industry hasn't seen any serious restrictions caused by the Endangered Species Act since a single Indiana bat halted timber sales in the White Mountain National Forest in 1998. 

Leighlan Prout, wildlife biologist for the Forest Service, said some people thought the bat was an anomaly. The Indiana bat, which is an endangered species, doesn't normally reside as far north as New Hampshire. The Forest Service stopped timber sales for two years while it evaluated timber management policy as required by the Endangered Species Act. No population of Indiana bats was ever found there. 

"I don't believe (the Endangered Species Act) has impacted anything that happens on the forest in a significant way other than that two-year period," she said. 

In Concord, it was the Endangered Species Act that led to the protection of 25 acres behind Concord Municipal Airport as the Karner Blue Conservation Easement. Children from the Dame School plant lupine each year to help with habitat recovery and Fish and Game released more than a thousand captive-reared butterflies last summer. 

When the Army National Guard wanted to expand its aviation facility, it was required to donate the land as mitigation, Fuller said. That property abuts another 450 acres jointly protected by the Guard, Fish and Game, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife. 

The Karner blue is not the only success story in New Hampshire. The peregrine falcon was successfully returned to the state and taken off the endangered species list. In 1980, there were no falcon pairs in New Hampshire. The following year, the first captive-bred and released falcons nested at Franconia Notch. Now New Hampshire has about 15 breeding pairs. 

In 1989 there were no bald eagles in New Hampshire. Today there are 11 pairs. In that time, Maine's eagle population has risen from 200 pairs to 400. 

"The eagle is marching back, it's doing very well," said Mike Amaral of U.S. Fish and Wildlife. 

Amaral could not talk about the proposed changes but said that, if the goal is to protect and recover animals that are on their way to extinction, simply preserving a small population as a sort of "living relic" does not achieve that. 

Jan Pendlebury of the National Environmental Trust set up a tour of the Concord pine barrens yesterday to showcase the Karner blue and send a message to lawmakers: don't change a law that's working. During the tour, Fuller guided people down a path, instructing them to avoid stepping on the flagged lupine, which are the only source of food for the butterflies in their larval stage. "Watch every step," he said. 

Van de Poll said he thinks the drafted legislation, if proposed, would meet substantial opposition in Washington, particularly from government agencies whose authority over endangered species Pombo wants to reduce. 

(To view the Resources committee report log on to resourcescommittee.house.gov ) 

Copyright (c) 2005 Concord Monitor




*************************
Scott Hoffman Black
Ecologist/Entomologist
Executive Director
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
4828 SE Hawthorne 
Portland, OR 97215 
Direct line (503) 449-3792
sblack at xerces.org




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Since 1971 we have been dedicated to protecting the diversity of life through the conservation of invertebrates.


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