Environmental Defense Fund Cites Wildlife Winners, Losers
12/30/99
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Title: Group cites wildlife winners - and losers
Source: Environmental News Network
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 30, 1999
Byline: Margot Higgins
The nature of threats to endangered species in the United States may
have changed, but more species are now in danger of extinction than
at any other time in the country's history, says the Environmental
Defense Fund.
Over-exploitation - the bane of conservationists at the turn of the
century - is no longer a major threat to most species except fish,
according to an EDF report. Hunting and fur-trapping have been
replaced by habitat destruction, pollution and the invasion of non-
native species.
As the century draws to a close, the EDF has compiled a list of the
biggest wildlife winners and losers in the U.S. over the past 100
years.
"The real list of wildlife winners and losers is limitless," said
David Wilcove, an ecologist with the EDF. "Each species that we chose
to be on the list told a story that we thought people ought to be
aware of."
Topping the list of winners is the bald eagle, whose population in
the lower 48 states dropped to fewer than 450 pairs in the 1960s. The
eagle's remarkable recovery owes to protected nesting sites,
reintroduction programs made possible under the Endangered Species
Act and a ban on DDT, the pesticide that caused the birds to lay
infertile eggs.
This summer, the Department of the Interior proposed to remove the
bald eagle from the Endangered Species List. A final decision on de-
listing is expected by July 2000.
Another winner is the white-tailed deer. Unregulated hunting and
extensive deforestation had eliminated the deer from most of the
range they occupied circa 1900. New hunting laws, the regeneration of
eastern forests and the relocation of primary predators such as
wolves and mountain lions have allowed the white-tailed deer to stage
one of the century's biggest comebacks.
Today, an estimated 17 million to 25 million white-tailed deer roam
American forests, fields and even suburbs.
Topping the list of wildlife washouts is the Snake River sockeye
salmon. Few salmon in history swam as far or climbed as high as the
brawny sockeye, which traveled 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean to
the Columbia River to the Snake River, finally reaching spawning
grounds in Idaho's Redfish Lake.
A difficult journey in the best of times, the sockeye's migration has
become virtually impossible in recent decades due to dams, water
diversion, logging, grazing and other activities that have destroyed
habitat. By the time the Endangered Species Act was enacted - January
1992 - and the Snake River sockeye was granted protection, only a
handful of the fish remained.
"[The list] shows the importance of wildlife conservation enactment
at the beginning of the century as well as the fact that an altered
ecosystem can cause both an under-abundance of species as well as an
over-abundance," Wilcove said.
"Wildlife in the U.S. is in a greater state of crisis now than at any
time since the Ice Age, but there are very hopeful signs that we can
save and recover disappearing species," he added.