Defenders of Wildlife Blog

Brilliant, Blue, and Bouncing Back!

Defenders of Wildlife has set itself the goal of moving more than 100 endangered species up the federal recovery ladder over the next decade. Our “Road to Recovery” series will highlight several of these plants and animals and outline the challenges that lay ahead for improving their status.

Photo courtesy of John & Karen Hollingsworth / USFWS

The Karner blue butterfly was first identified in 1944 by the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Though better known for his controversial book Lolita published 11 years later, Nabokov was also a dedicated lepidopterist who spent time as a zoology researcher at a Harvard museum. He described the Karner blue butterfly during a trip along the New York Central Railroad in Karner, New York (now part of Albany). Now, all that remains of the town is Old Karner Street, and the blue butterfly that shares its name has been considered endangered since 1992.

The Karner blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis) was abundant in the 1900′s and once ranged from New Hampshire to Iowa and north into Canada. Today populations only persist in Wisconsin,  Minnesota, Ohio and Indiana, along with very small populations in New York and New Hampshire, having endured an astounding 99% reduction in population in the past century.

The Karner blue has an inch-long wingspan with light silver and brown hues on the underside of their wings and deep blue pigments on top. Adults drink nectar from an array of plant species, including rock cress, butterfly weed and goldenrod, and live anywhere from four to 21 days during which they mate and lay eggs. The Karner blue is bivoltine, meaning it produces two broods each year — one in spring and one in summer. The larvae have a symbiotic relationship with several species of ant that defend against predators and increase survival rates, though larva survival is ultimately dependent on the availability of just one plant.

Photo courtesy of Joel Trickwild / USFWS

The Karner blue butterfly’s annual life cycle is inextricably tied to wild blue
lupine since the larva eat its leaves exclusively. The majority of the remaining Karner populations are small, and several are at risk of extinction from habitat degradation.

Wisconsin currently supports the majority of the Karner population and is the only state so far to develop a comprehensive statewide Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP). As of 2006 the HCP includes 40 partners consisting of major forestry stakeholders, conservation organizations, county forest departments, utility companies, private landowners, The Nature Conservancy, and the Wisconsin Departments of Agriculture and Transportation. These groups are working together to make sure that open areas are maintained as butterfly habitat, while ensuring that potentially destructive activities like timber harvest, prescribed burns and mowing are compatible with long-term Karner conservation.

In New York, the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission in New York is clearing away non-native plants and re-growing lupine to guarantee the butterflies have enough lupine. Since 1991 the Commission has been administering controlled brush fires to maintain the unique ecosystem for both plants and animals. In addition the preserve has been protecting precious habitat for the Karner as well as other native species.

For the last decade, captive-bred butterfly populations have been reintroduced to New Hampshire and Ohio by local conservation groups and are successfully breeding in the wild. The Federal Karner Blue Butterfly Recovery Plan proposed in 2003 outlines a plan to restore the species over a 20-year period. But many communities are taking the initiative to start butterfly restorations programs of their own. For example, students at Farnsworth Middle School in Guilderland, New York, began a project as part of their ecology curriculum about the Pine Bush ecosystem. Farnsworth’s seventh graders raise and study butterflies, including the Karner blue, which are then released in the summer. The students are active in scientific research with the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission and are the only school in the nation where the students are allowed to handle the Karner blue.

With collaborative efforts like these, the future of these brilliant butterflies is looking much brighter. And because they have a such a short lifecycle, populations can bounce back quickly, which means it shouldn’t take much to move these blue beauties farther down the road to recovery.

©James Ownby

Mark Salvo, Federal Lands Policy Analyst

There are few birds in the American West that know how to party like sage-grouse. Oh sure, you’ve got your hummingbirds with their swooping and diving and your huge, gawky sandhill cranes with their flamboyant, noisy mating rituals. But for sheer spectacle, nothing beats the sage-grouse and now is the perfect time to see them strut their stuff because it’s mating season out West.

Sage-grouse dancing occurs from March to May. In early spring at dawn, and often at dusk, sage-grouse congregate on “leks”— ancestral strutting grounds to which the birds return year after year. To attract a hen, males jockey for position, fan their tail feathers and swell their breasts to reveal yellow air sacs, and then, just as quickly, deflate them to make an utterly unique “swish-swish-coooopoink!” sound that can be heard from over a mile away. Scientists aren’t certain what about this flamboyant display is attractive to females, but it works. Take a look:

Sage-grouse are the charismatic ambassador of the “Sagebrush Sea,” a term given to the vast sagebrush prairie that once sprawled across thirteen western states and three Canadian provinces. Lewis and Clark described the grouse in their journal as the “cock of the plains”, and nineteenth century travelers reported seeing huge flocks of sage-grouse that darkened the sky as they lifted from valley floors. Native Americans emulated sage-grouse in ceremonial dress and dance. Settlers hunted the bird for food, and even collected sage-grouse eggs in spring for table use. Centuries of westerners have admired sage-grouse as fellow dwellers of the high desert, and birders travel from around the world to see sage-grouse in the wild.

Unfortunately, like too many other iconic western wildlife species, sage-grouse are in trouble. Sagebrush grasslands are a heavily used landscape. Humans have plowed, sprayed, burned, drilled, developed, mined and grazed millions of acres of sagebrush habitat. The remaining habitat is fragmented and degraded by weeds, wildfire, juniper encroachment, utility corridors, roads and fences. Sage-grouse range has been reduced by almost half with the loss of sagebrush steppe and grouse populations have declined to just ten percent of their historic numbers.

Sage-grouse in the snow (© Alan St. John)

William Hornaday of the New York Zoological Society was among the first to express concern for sage-grouse in 1916, publishing a pamphlet titled “Save the Sage Grouse from Extinction: A Demand from Civilization to the Western States.” Conservationists have heeded his call and launched a west-wide campaign to protect the grouse and the Sagebrush Sea. After struggling for more than a decade, we finally got a break in 2011 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service committed to review sage-grouse for listing under the Endangered Species Act by 2015. The date certain for a range-wide sage-grouse listing decision has compelled a multitude of federal and state agencies and local entities to finally develop conservation strategies to protect and recover sage-grouse and their habitat.

Defenders of Wildlife is heavily engaged in these planning processes. We are analyzing thousands of pages of documents and working to improve federal and state conservation strategies. In Washington, DC, we are urging the Obama administration and Congressional representatives to strengthen conservation initiatives for sage-grouse, and out West we are diligently working to ensure that new development won’t harm the species.

But sometimes you’ve just got to make time to enjoy these spectacular birds. We invite you attend a show at a sage-grouse lek this spring. Dress warmly, bring binoculars and coffee, and be ready for fun. And then join Defenders to conserve sage-grouse so that they may continue to impress for generations to come.

Pelayo Alvarez, California Rangeland Conservation Coalition Program Coordinator

California grasslands (c) Alan Vernon

In the Golden State, an odd alliance has taken root. Two groups with distinct (sometimes opposing) views of how land should be used are teaming up to work together: the conservation community and the state’s ranchers. Across California, there are more than 11 million acres of privately-owned rangelands — grasslands, oak woodlands and vernal pool habitats that a myriad of species depend on, including the San Joaquin kit fox, Swainson’s hawk and the California tiger salamander. Yet as valuable as all this land is to wildlife, those who own it are often under pressure to convert it to more lucrative land uses, such as urbanization and intensive agriculture. So long as a rancher owns the land, they keep the habitat intact while using it for grazing – a practice that is particularly important in California where grazing animals help keep invasive plant species from gaining a foothold in the native ecosystem. This means that the fate of this region’s biodiversity — its wildlife, plant life, and all pieces of this living landscape — is inextricably linked to private ranching.  By working with ranchers to help them stay in ranching and manage their land with wildlife conservation in mind, we can keep countless acres of habitat from being plowed up for crops or built into housing developments.

And so, the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition was born:  a broad and diverse alliance of conservation organizations, government agencies, academics and the ranching community working together to protect rangeland habitats in California’s Central Valley. Defenders is a founding member of this group of odd bedfellows that first came together in 2005 to curb the devastating effects that the conversion of rangelands to urbanization and intensive agriculture is having on species and habitats in California.

California Program Director Kim Delfino speaks at the 2013 summit.

The Coalition had its 8th Annual Summit at UC Davis last month, held in conjunction with the Rustici Science Symposium. The event brought together more than 390 attendees to learn about the latest science on rangeland ecology and management, and to discuss and present solutions for the challenges that ranchers face when trying to balance the needs of wildlife with the realities of keeping a viable livestock operation.  As with every year’s Summit, it was great to see scientists, conservationists and land managers working together.  Our California Program Director, Kim Delfino, delivered the opening remarks, reminding all present that for the Coalition to succeed in protecting rangelands, we would all have to change our long-entrenched views and presumptions about one another.

The Coalition was created based on scientific evidence that with proper management, grazing could benefit species in open grasslands and delicate habitats such as vernal pools.  But science alone will not be enough to protect grasslands from conversion when ranchers must decide whether or not to sell the land.  The Summit keeps that focus on solid science while recognizing the important roles that social and economic factors can play in driving conservation, and the agenda provided an excellent mix of talks by ranchers, researchers and conservationists with topics ranging from invasive species control to the challenges of producing grass-fed livestock while grazing on a wildlife refuge. Such a variety of speakers and topics allows for great conversations around the table.

The San Joaquin kit fox is one of the many species that rely on California’s grasslands (c)Barry Peterson

The Annual Summit provides an exceptional opportunity to meet other folks with different perspectives but with one thing in common: a love for rangelands.  The evidence was everywhere. A few ranchers were spotted buying manuals from the California Native Plant Society. The director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spoke to representatives of Resource Conservation Districts, and a Farm Bureau representative got to talk to experts in ecosystem services.  Of course, there can also be disagreement. One of this year’s most interesting exchanges occurred when a rancher argued with the USDA that feral pigs, far from being a nuisance, actually provide valuable ecological services to his ranch.  While we do not agree on everything, it is the ability to connect and learn from each other’s perspectives that allow us to work collaboratively – and that collaboration continues to be more and more important as new challenges arise.

Aside from the common theme of fighting rangeland conversion, there are a number of issues ahead that will keep testing the strength of this Coalition, including climate change and wildlife-livestock coexistence. But these relationships that have been forged over the years among scientists, ranchers and conservationists allow us to better manage and protect these complex ecosystems for both people and wildlife, and to tackle new challenges together.  The survival of grassland habitats and species depends on it.

Tim Male, VP of Conservation Science & Policy

Black-tailed deer graze on a South Dakota prairie (c) Moriah Brocar

I watched Little House on the Prairie as a boy … I might have had a crush on Laura Ingalls.  It was a story of one family on the frontier and their efforts to break the prairie and make a successful life for themselves as farmers in Minnesota.  The fictional characters succeeded … and their non-fictional counterparts in the real American Midwest did too.  Unfortunately, they succeeded a little too well from an environmental perspective.

America’s tallgrass and mixed grass prairies are mostly gone today.  States like Arkansas have less than one percent left.  States like North Dakota have lost 80 percent of their prairie.  Gone are bison and pronghorn antelope from prairies, but the loss of these landscapes has also imperiled many less obvious species that make prairies special – endangered orchids, fritillary butterflies, grasshopper sparrows.

The loss of America’s prairies continues as agricultural technology creates new techniques to plow and irrigate the hilly, rocky or poorer soils or more disaster-prone areas that until recently supported remaining grasslands.  And in the prairie pothole region of North and South Dakota, it’s not just grassland but also wetlands that are being lost.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that up to 1.4 million isolated wetlands in these prairies are at risk of being drained.  Populations of many kinds of ducks will be hit hardest by some of these losses, since this region is the ‘duck factory’ of America.

High crop prices are fueling part of this cycle of destruction, and corn ethanol subsidies help drive those prices.  Adding to the problem are the extremely generous subsidies that the federal government provides to even America’s richest corporate agribusiness to help them buy crop insurance.  Think of your car insurance and imagine that Congress paid Geico to sell you a car insurance policy. They paid 60 percent of your out-of-pocket cost to buy the insurance, and then gave more money (called a subsidy) to Geico in case you had a lot of accidents and they started losing money.  That is how our crop insurance system works, and when subsidies are that generous, economists agree that it starts producing strange outcomes.   For example, since taxpayers are covering more than half the cost of insurance, we take away the risk from plowing up those grasslands and wetlands.  Farmers have no reason not to plow up wetlands or prairie because even if a crop fails to make it to harvest, insurance and taxpayers cover the losses.  The farmer wins either way – the only loser is the prairie and the species that rely on it.

Prairie dogs are another species that make their home in these grasslands.

Last week, two Members of Congress — Reps. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota.) and Kristi Noem (R-South Dakota) — reintroduced legislation to help stop some of the pressure that taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies put on prairie and wetlands.  The Protect our Prairies Act would pull back almost $200 million in insurance subsidies by dramatically lowering the amount the government provides on any acres of native grassland that have been recently plowed. This doesn’t mean that farmers can’t keep farming, just that they won’t have as much of an incentive to plow up prairies to do it.  It’s a great idea that has Defenders’ enthusiastic support and should be passed by Congress.

We are working on additional, bold ways to rein in billions in spending on the other corporate insurance subsidies that drive environmental destruction. For example, we agree with proposals that would prevent millionaires from getting as much subsidy as other farmers.  More importantly, we are working hard to ensure that Congress passes accountability provisions that require farmers have to abide by modest conservation requirements, in exchange for a generous subsidy provided by taxpayers. This is called ‘conservation compliance’ and was successfully included in the Senate-passed Farm Bill in 2012, partly because of our efforts. There are smart ways to maintain a taxpayer-supported safety net for America’s family farmers without doing as much harm to our environment.

Tim Male, Vice President of Conservation Science and Policy 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For lesser prairie chickens and greater sage grouse, two very similar birds, things are trending toward the latter.  Greater sage grouse have disappeared from more than 50 percent of their range, and the prairie chicken from more than 86 percent of theirs.  Both are candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act.  But the stark differences in federal goals for these two species highlight problems in how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is managing different species.

The sage grouse has lost much of its habitat to agricultural development (Credit: USFWS)

For some species that have not yet been added to the endangered species list, federal and state agencies, private landowners and businesses that might be affected by it sometimes make a last ditch effort to keep that listing from happening.  To prevent it, conservation efforts need to eliminate or reduce threats to the species, including the threat of having a population so small that it  could go extinct simply by chance. Below a certain number, the population can’t survive. The question is how biologists determine what that number is for each species.

Currently, there are up to 300,000-500,000 sage grouse on tens of millions of acres of western sage brush habitat.  The FWS determined that any population of sage grouse with fewer than 200 males, or a total of fewer than 500 birds, must be considered ‘at risk’ because the small population is inherently more vulnerable to extinction. They identified more than 40 populations that meet these conditions, and set goals for their conservation. The agency’s strategy calls for the smallest of these populations of sage grouse to be protected so that threats go down and numbers go up – a sensible approach, and one that should be applicable to most species under similar conditions.

The FWS’s conservation goals for the lesser prairie chicken, however, offer a stark contrast. There are currently an estimated 37,000 prairie chickens remaining – a far lower number than the sage grouse, and this out of a historic population of two to three million.  For this bird, the agency has hinted that the species is not “at risk” so long as it maintains a minimum of four “strongholds,” each consisting of 25,000-50,000 acres of habitat and just 6 male and 6 female birds.  Add that up and what do you get?  200,000 acres of habitat and only 500 birds in total. Although the documents also obliquely reference ‘additional strongholds,” it looks like they are setting this low threshold up as being enough conservation to avoid listing.  And even if additional strongholds are established, there would likely remain large, unaccounted gaps between the goals for the prairie chicken and those for the sage grouse.  Dan Ashe, Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, stated that he sees this plan as having all the ‘right ingredients’ for conservation to make an endangered species listing unnecessary.

A lesser prairie chicken in New Mexico (Credit: Larry Lamsa)

As a scientist, it’s extremely difficult for me to understand any scientific rationale for the differences in conservation goals between these two very similar bird species.  Both species have generally similar diets, longevity, reproductive potential and breeding system.  How can one say that the sage grouse’s future depends upon having 20,000 birds in dozens of populations across 165 million acres of habitat, but at the same time state that prairie chickens only require 200,000 acres of habitat and 500 breeding birds in total? And, if the Service’s goals for the prairie chicken are scientifically valid, and a population of 500 means a species is neither threatened nor endangered, how can FWS even have considered listing the 500,000-strong greater sage grouse?  Those differences certainly look like the agency is setting expedient goals rather than scientific ones.

The Endangered Species Act is capable of achieving great things for species on the brink, but with taxpayer dollars funding their recovery it is important that the Act’s protections be applied to the species that need it most. It’s unfortunate that FWS has never set measurable standards that define what makes a threatened or endangered species, even though the IUCN, the State of Florida, New Zealand and other countries have already done so.  Those standards would be one step toward a more scientific basis for one of the most important wildlife questions the U.S. government faces: whether a species is or isn’t endangered.

Tragedy struck at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana last week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, a wildfire burned some 14,000 acres, including most of the 2,100-acre bison pasture where 61 recently reintroduced Yellowstone bison and their 21 calves had been grazing.

Eighty-two Yellowstone bison were released into a 2,100-acre pasture this summer at Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana. Nearly all of that rolling grassland burned in a tragic fire last week, leaving 10 dead bison in its wake.

Sadly, 8 adult bison and 2 calves died in the fast-moving fire or were put down as a result of injuries caused by the fire. The remaining 72 bison will be moved to another pasture while Fort Peck Fish and Game wildlife managers rebuild the charred electric fence.

The cause of the fire is unknown, but it appears to have started a few miles west of the bison pasture along a county road connecting Scobey and Wolf Point, two small, rural outposts on the high, windy plains. The fire began Tuesday afternoon and spread quickly in gusts reaching up to 40 m.p.h.

Fort Peck Fish and Game will have their work cut out for them, however, as they must quickly rebuild the electric fence that was completed less than two months ago. Defenders has helped contribute funds in the past for bison fencing at Fort Peck and for the transport of genetically pure bison to the reservation. The bison were transferred from a quarantine facility outside of Yellowstone National Park, where some of the bison had been held for more than five years as part of an effort to provide genetically pure Yellowstone bison for restoration efforts.

The new herd of Yellowstone bison at Fort Peck began with the arrival of 61 bison in March and the birth of 21 calves this spring. In July, all 82 bison were released from a temporary enclosure into a 2,100-acre pasture. Fort Peck has plans to open an additional 5,000 acres for the bison this fall where the herd could eventually grow into the hundreds. About half of the bison will be given to the Fort Belknap reservation once fencing is completed there.

Defenders bison expert Jonathan Proctor has been in close contact with Robbie Magnan, director of Fort Peck Fish and Game, to see how we can help in the wake of this tragedy. While repairs to the bison fence are already underway, we’re committed to assisting the tribes in any way we can.

“It’s heartbreaking to lose these ten bison after the tribes at Fort Peck have waited so long and worked so hard for their return,” said Proctor. “But we’re determined to do everything we can to help the tribes move forward with their bison restoration program as planned. This tragic fire is not the end of bison restoration at Fort Peck.”

We’ll keep you updated on the situation as we learn more, and keep an eye out for email alerts explaining how you can help the bison at Fort Peck recover quickly from this terrible tragedy.

Read more about the historic return of bison to their home at Fort Peck.