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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
A cheerful endangered species story? It's as rare as an ivory-billed woodpecker. Yet the recently reported sighting of this "ghost bird," long believed extinct, has driven home the message that not all such stories end badly. So we looked for other animals that have made a comeback since Americans began protecting them in earnest a century ago.
In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act, which prohibited interstate trade of wildlife taken illegally. Efforts to safeguard the nation's natural heritage culminated in the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It requires federal authorities to identify threatened or endangered animal and plant species and to help them recover, often by restricting how their habitats may be used. The ESA is supplemented by scores of conservation, hunting and antipollution laws, and the nation's protected lands--almost a third of the United States is publicly owned. But for 30 years the ESA has been the key to conservation. Today, more than 1,200 plants and animals are listed under the law as threatened or endangered, and thousands more are "species of concern."
Now the Endangered Species Act itself is threatened. Because the ESA can restrict development, White House and Congressional critics charge that the law places the well-being of animals over that of people. Craig Manson, a top Interior Department official, said in November 2003 that protecting endangered species is "not a priority." Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA), chair of the House Resources Committee, is drafting legislation that would blunt the law's force by making it even more difficult to list a species as endangered.
ESA supporters protest that weakening the law would have a far-reaching impact. Scientists have only begun to understand how living things interact, and eliminating any one species can disrupt an entire community of living things. And it would be tragic to lose species, such as plants that produce cancer-fighting compounds, before scientists have had a chance to study them. Without the ESA, advocates say, many species would join the passenger pigeon, the Eastern elk, the blue pike, the Santa Catalina monkey flower and the estimated 500 other species in the United States that have vanished in the past few hundred years, victims of overhunting, overharvesting or property development. As Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson has said, destroying plant and animal habitats and the unt diversity of life within them "is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us."
But what does it take to save a species? We sent veteran environmental reporter Daniel Glick to investigate. Here, his ten success stories.
Worth More Alive Than Dead
HAWAIIAN GREEN SEA TURTLE Status: Threatened Year listed: 1978 Average adult weight: 300 pounds
On hawaii's big island, marine biologist George Balazs seems to know most of the turtles by name--or at least by their markings and tags. He conducts what may be one of the longest continuous monitoring of any sea reptile, an effort of 34 years, and has presided over a cultural makeover that has turned the sea turtle, once a popular menu item, into a star of a multimillion-dollar tourist industry. But Balazs credits the giant reptile itself. "The honu touch your heart," he says, using the Hawaiian word for turtle. "These turtles are their own best ambassadors."
For decades, Hawaiians hunted the animals for their skin, which was turned into handbags, and their meat, a delicacy. "In the 1970s, a turtle was a hundred dollar bill," says Balazs. After he witnessed fishermen unloading a boat full of live green sea turtles bound for market in 1969, he worried that the species wouldn't breed fast enough to sustain the demand. So he made an inventory of nesting female turtles at the animals' main breeding site: the French Frigate Shoals, an atoll about 500 miles west of Hawaii in an area that had been designated a wildlife sanctuary by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1909. In 1973, his first year of fieldwork, Balazs counted a mere 67 nesting females, not enough to compensate for the rate at which Hawaiian green sea turtles were being hunted.
Largely because of Balazs' research and advocacy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 1978 classified the Hawaiian green sea turtle as threatened under the ESA. Killing a honu became a federal offense. The green sea turtle made progress, despite its slow reproductive pace: females reach sexual maturity at an average age of 25, and swim from Hawaii to their nesting grounds and back--a 1,000 mile round trip--every three or four years. (In the 1980s, an outbreak of fibropapilloma, a mysterious disease that afflicts many turtle species, dealt the animals a setback, but the disease seems to be abating.) Balazs estimates the number of nesting females has risen to over 400 annually--a...
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