Feds: Time to ease protections on long-endangered woodpecker
The red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird declared endangered in 1970 and surviving today in 11 states’ scattered longleaf pine forests, has recovered enough to relax its federal protection, officials said Friday. But not all wildlife advocates agree.
“T he r e d- c o c k a de d woodpecker has flourished to the point that today we can propose to downlist them from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act,” Aurelia Skipwith, director of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said during a news conference Friday with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue.
But Ben Prater, southeastern director for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, said nothing released to the public so far justifies the change announced Friday at Fort Benning, Georgia, one of 13 military installations working to conserve the cardinal-sized bird.
“We’re still short of recovery goals and certainly have not seen threats be abated,” he said.
Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the bird’s recovery “a tremen
dous victory for the Endangered Species Act” and not the Trump administration.
“Secretary Bernhardt, who is a former lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and other special interests, has been an absolute disaster for endangered species,” Greenwald said in a news release.
Although the Fish and Wildlife Service told landowners in April there was a chance of entirely dropping all protection for the woodpeckers, it didn’t do that. Still, it is also requesting comment on future “delisting,” according to the news release.
The bird’s recovery from the brink of extinction is a great success story, but the birds still need continued protection, said Jeff Wal
ters of Virginia Tech, coauthor of a “species status report” about the woodpeckers. He said their survival if the proposal is approved will depend on rules still to be written.
The Trump administration changed Endangered Species Act rules to end automatic continued protection when a species is moved from endangered to threatened, he noted. Now a threatened species is only protected if special rules are written to describe such requirements.
“That allows us to carefully craft and carefully tailor a proposed rule that will focus our energy and resources and time we feel best to further the recovery of this one species,” Bernhardt said.