Bald eagles on a nest at Channel Islands National Park/NPS file
National Parks Are Vital In Recovering Threatened And Endangered Species
By Lori Sonken
Annie Little remembers the moment in 2006 when she and her colleagues realized they had succeeded in recovering the endangered bald eagle at Channel Islands National Park roughly 25 miles offshore of Southern California. They watched a chick’s birth captured live on camera inside its nest – the first time in more than 50 years that a bald eagle had hatched naturally in the park, and a reason to celebrate.
Little credits the Institute for Wildlife Studies and the National Park Service for the bald eagles soaring today around the rugged and remote Channel Islands with their craggy coastlines, wildflowers, sand dunes, and a diverse marine environment.
Long native to the islands, bald eagles disappeared from this landscape in the 1950s due to the effects of DDT and human disturbance. Actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 to ban DDT -- a pesticide that interfered with the bald eagles’ ability to produce eggshells thick enough to hold a chick -- played a significant role in the birds’ recovery nationwide.
Efforts to return the majestic birds to the Channel Islands began in earnest in 2002. From that year through 2006 the organizations transported 61 juveniles -- collected from nests in Alaska and California –- by boat to the mountainous Santa Cruz Island, home to more than 60 species of plants and animals, that, thanks to the islands' remote and isolated location, are found nowhere else on Earth. The birds were raised in hack towers until they were three months old, then released into the wild.
“The lesson here is with hard work and partnerships and perseverance you can recover species. It shows how everything is connected out there. You need to look at a big picture with conservation and take a comprehensive look at restoration,” said Little, supervisory natural resource manager at Channel Islands National Park.
Surprisingly, the National Park Service does not maintain a comprehensive list of endangered and threatened species living in the National Park System and does not know how much it spends on their conservation. “…Efforts directed at endangered species recovery would come from many different line items across many different levels of the organization,” said Paula Capece, a wildlife biologist with the Park Service's Wildlife Conservation Branch, in an email.
A Daunting Challenge
According to the National Parks Conservation Association, Park Service scientists are trying to conserve approximately 600 endangered and threatened species across the National Park System in more than 200 park sites. The challenge is daunting. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and invasive species, along with decades of underfunding, impede efforts to combat the global wildlife extinction crisis and loss of biodiversity.
“A shortage of cash combined with the unfolding impacts of climate change and increased human development nationally have combined to create a perfect storm of threats for America’s most imperiled national park species. Simply put, we are doing a lot, and we need to do a lot more,” said Bart Melton, NPCA’s wildlife program director.
Some parks have well-known species, such as the threatened grizzly bear in Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Everglades National Park is home to the endangered Florida panther. The range for the endangered California condor, the largest bird in North America, extends to Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona and Pinnacles National Park in central California.
Less familiar species, including plants such as the endangered sentry milk-vetch, which lives exclusively in Grand Canyon National Park, and the foot-tall grass, Guadalupe fescue, which resides in Big Bend National Park, also are found across the park system.
The ʻākohekohe, or crested honeycreeper, is in danger of going extinct/NPS file
Three Hawaiian parks -- Haleakalā National Park, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, and Kalaupapa National Historical Park -- combined have 244 endangered and threatened species – more than any other parks in the country. This is not surprising, considering Hawaii has more listed species than any state in the country. Of the 1,675 endangered and threatened wildlife and plants nationwide, 474 can be found in Hawaii.
Biologist Christopher Warren joined the Park Service about two years ago, but has worked with birds for 10 years on Maui, home to Haleakalā National Park, where honeycreepers with their iconic curved bills are endemic, meaning they only live in Hawaii. At their peak, there were 50 honeycreeper species –- biologists call them jewels of the rain forest -- in Hawaii. Only 17 species remain today, and two living in the subtropical rainforest in Haleakalā National Park, the kiwikiu and the ʻākohekohe, are critically endangered and could go extinct within two years. Fewer than 250 kiwikiu and 2,100 ʻākohekohe are estimated to live today. They are threatened by avian malaria, as well as non-native species, climate change, and habitat alteration. Four other honeycreepers on Maui could vanish within 10 years for the same reasons.
In Warren’s view, controlling non-native mosquitoes brought by whaling ships to Hawaii in the 1800s is the only hope for the birds’ survival. A single mosquito bite can be fatal.
The Department of the Interior in partnership with the state of Hawaii and other organizations this year are implementing a $14 million strategy, which includes a birth control program for mosquitoes, after an environmental assessment on the project is completed. Used in agriculture to control fruit flies, the method, known as the Incompatible Insect Technique, uses no pesticides. Instead, male mosquitoes raised in a laboratory and infected with one type of Wolbachia, a bacteria, then released into the wild to mate with females laden with another type of Wolbachia. Because mosquitoes with different types of Wolbachia cannot reproduce, the end result, if all goes as planned, will be female mosquitoes laying eggs that do not hatch.
Additional DOI efforts to save honeycreepers and other forest birds include relocating the birds to higher elevations to escape the mosquitoes, constructing more captive care facilities for the birds, and hiring additional field staff to deploy the IIT at higher elevations.
Honeycreepers are pollinators. If they go extinct, so too could the native plants they pollinate. Haleakalā is home to a variety of native and endemic species, one being the charismatic Haleakalā Silversword found atop Haleakalā volcano in Haleakalā National Park. The plant is pollinated by pollinators like the endemic yellow-faced bee and lives from 3-90 years but flowers only once, sending up a 6-foot-tall spike filled with as many as 600 half-dollar-sized flowers resembling daisies, and then dies “in a fantastic blaze of glory,” said Woody Mallinson, park biologist.
Species' Dependency
Across the park system landscape, animals and plants demonstrate their interconnectedness and dependency on one another. When bald eagles disappeared from the Channel Islands, golden eagles moved in and preyed on the endemic island fox, whose population in 2000 dropped to 14 on Santa Rosa Island, 15 on San Miguel Island, and 62 on Santa Cruz Island.
The Park Service is working in Badlands and Wind Cave national parks to boost the population of black-footed ferrets/NPS file
Listed as endangered in 2004, the island fox rebounded after scientists implemented a recovery strategy that included captive breeding and reintroduction, relocating 64 golden eagles to northern California, and removing from the islands the feral goats, pigs, and sheep that had gobbled up the native plants critical to the island fox’s survival. By 2016, the island fox recovered and was removed from the endangered species list – the fastest mammal recovery ever, according to The Nature Conservancy.
Another mammal recovery effort is underway at Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. The effort revolves around black-footed ferrets, which colonize abandoned prairie dog burrows and depend on the prairie dog for 90 percent of its food. When the prairie dog population in the parks declined due to disease, so did the black-footed ferret.
Working on the black-footed-ferret’s recovery is the highlight of Park Service Assistant Regional Director Alexandra Picavet’s 34-year-long NPS career. “It’s rewarding because this is a species that has struggled for decades and we are having success in having them reestablish in natural areas,” she said.
Recovery efforts include vaccinating the ferrets against the sylvatic plague and applying insecticides to prairie dog holes to keep away the disease-carrying fleas.
“They’re so stinking cute. These animals are really adorable. They chatter a lot at you. They don’t like having inoculations. Or being weighed or having work done on them. The work we do is critical to their recovery,” said Picavet.
Only 150 black-footed ferrets live in the wild, and most have microchips tracking their whereabouts. Another 300 live in captive breeding facilities at various locations. Their population needs to increase to 3,000 before they will be removed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species list.
Other endangered species living in Badlands National Park include the northern long-haired bat, monarch butterfly, whooping crane, and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.
Time-Consuming Work
Species recovery takes time. It took 200 years or more for species to decline to the point where they are listed as endangered and threatened. It’s not a surprise that only about 100 have been removed from the endangered and threatened species lists because they either recovered or new information shows listing is no longer warranted.
Signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has kept roughly more than 95 percent of listed species from going extinct. Additional species are regularly proposed for listing, such as the ghost orchid in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. The FWS has until the end of the month to determine the fate of this species.
Conservation and scientific organizations contend that more species could be conserved if the federal government had adequate resources for listing and conserving them. In a letter to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees last year, 150 conservation organizations, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and NPCA, called on the Congress to increase from $300 million to $700 million the budget for the USFWS, the federal agency primarily responsible for administering the ESA.
“Sadly, the majority of extinctions are entirely preventable, so when we lose a species to extinction it represents an unforgivable moral failure. The U.S. has one of the most powerful tools to end extinction—the Endangered Species Act—yet decades of underfunding has kept it from realizing its full potential,” the letter said.
Congress provided support for endangered and threatened species in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act for NPS, USFWS and other agencies. But conservation organizations, scientists, and others contend additional support is necessary.
“Sadly, we must continue to call for increased investments for our national parks and other agencies,” said Melton with NPCA.
