In our June 2008 issue, Jeffrey Wells, senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative, visiting fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and author of Birder's Conservation Handbook: 100 North American Birds at Risk, wrote an article about why the Endangered Species List doesn't come close to describing the status of all of America's birds.
"Because listing under the [Endangered Species Act] is a policy process, not a scientific process," he wrote, "many species that are endangered or threatened do not appear on the list."
He pointed out that the Red List published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature includes 23 species that the ESA does not. Case in point: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just announced that it will not list the Pacific seabird Cook's Petrel, a species listed as Vulnerable on the Red List.
Today, Wells and three colleagues have followed up with a new analysis of endangered-species lists in 47 states. Published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science-One, it shows that state lists are "failing to protect the species that need help the most and instead are focusing on common species that meet their range edges within states."
Wells's co-authors are Kenneth V. Rosenberg, director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, David W. Mehlman, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Migratory Bird Program, and Bruce Robertson, a research associate at Michigan State University's W. K. Kellogg Biological Station in Hickory Corners, Michigan.
The researchers compiled a database of all birds listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern by states and found that half of the listings are of species that are at low risk of extinction globally and have small proportions of their populations within the states that list them.
The Great Egret (pictured at right) is one of several examples the researchers found. It numbers as many as 2.2 million birds worldwide, yet it's listed as endangered in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, threatened in Connecticut and Wisconsin, and of special concern in eight states.
Other listings that, honestly, are difficult to comprehend, considering how large their populations are:
Bank Swallow: Threatened in California, special concern in Mississippi and Kentucky. Partners in Flight population estimate: 50 million.
Magnolia Warbler: Special concern in Virginia, special interest in Ohio. Partners in Flight population estimate: 30 million.
Dark-eyed Junco: Threatened in Ohio, special concern in Kentucky and Rhode Island. Partners in Flight population estimate: 260 million.
The downside is that birds that should be protected by states often are not.
Long-billed Curlew (pictured above) faces "increasing threats in the grasslands and prairies of North America, both on [its] breeding and wintering grounds," according to BirdLife International, yet it's listed in only six of 16 states in its range.
Lesser Prairie-Chicken, listed as Vulnerable on the Red List, is considered threatened in Colorado, but isn't listed by the other four states in which it breeds.
Bendire's Thrasher, which, according to BirdLife International, is "so rare that trends cannot be estimated reliably from Breeding Bird Survey data," is of special concern in California, yet receives no protection in five other states.
And Golden-winged Warbler, listed as Near Threatened on the Red List, is protected in only nine of the 18 states in its range.
"We hope these results will be used to strengthen species priority-setting systems for use at local and regional levels across the world," the authors write. And they point out that the developers of the international Red List can help: In 2003, they published guidelines to apply Red List criteria at regional levels. Seems like a good place to start. --Matt Mendenhall, Associate Editor
Long-billed Curlew photo by Mike Baird, bairdphotos.com. Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Great Egret photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Sign up for our FREE e-newsletter!
Become a fan of Birder's World on Facebook.