Government may relax protections for endangered woodpecker
The red-cockaded woodpecker, a bird declared endangered in 1970 and surviving today in the scattered longleaf pine forests that remain in 11 U.S. states, has recovered enough to relax federal protections on the species, officials said Friday. But not all wildlife advocates agree.
Ben Prater, southeastern director for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, said nothing released to the public so far justifies the change announced Friday by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
“I think the bottom line is 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, lauded the bird’s recovery as “a tremendous 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 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told landowners in April that there was a chance of dropping all protections for the species, it is instead proposing to list the cardinal-sized woodpeckers as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Still, it is also requesting comment on whether to remove the bird from the list entirely.
The government is proposing a rule that would protect current habitat, forbidding damage to trees with woodpecker holes, harassment of the birds during breeding season and the use of insecticides near clusters, according to a news release.
Bernhardt and Perdue made the announcement Friday at Fort Benning, Ga., one of 13 military installations working to conserve the species.
The federal government spent $408 million on the species from 1998 to 2016, making it one of the most expensive on the endangered list.
Once found from New Jersey to Florida, west to Texas and north to Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee, red-cockaded woodpeckers now live only in coastal states from southern Virginia to East Texas and in parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma.
By the late 1970s, there were only 1,470 clusters — breeding pairs and young males that live nearby and help their parents care for nestlings. Fish and Wildlife Service experts now estimate there are nearly 7,800 clusters.