Suit filed to protect endangered Mount Graham red squirrel
Conservation groups sued the Trump administration last week saying the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have failed to adequately protect the imperiled Mount Graham red squirrel.
The suit said the federal government did not properly evaluate how summer homes and an abandoned camp in the Pinaleño Mountains in southeastern Arizona have harmed the squirrel and its remaining habitat.
Only about 75 of the squirrels remain on the planet, almost all of them on Mount Graham, in the isolated “sky islands” of the Coronado National Forest.
“Federal agencies have abdicated
their responsibility and now these tiny squirrels are teetering on the brink of extinction,” said Robin Silver, a co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups involved in the lawsuit.
“We’re hopeful that a judge will force them to do their jobs and ensure that red squirrels thrive again on Mount Graham,” he said. “We’re in the midst of a massive extinction crisis that’s tipping the balance of nature, and we can’t afford to lose one more species.”
The Sky Islands are a series of mountains that rise out of desert grasslands, linking the temperate mountain ranges in the United States with subtropical mountain ranges in Mexico.
The Coronado National Forest manages 17 of these mountaintop regions that provide diverse climate zones for a variety of plant and animal life.
Some of the mountains rise more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding desert floor, making the lowlands and high peaks drastically different, filled with plants and animals that could never survive in the surrounding deserts.
That’s why the region is one of the most biodiverse in the world. Of the many species that call it home, the Mount Graham red squirrel resides in critical habitat in the mountain islands that includes only spruce-fir forests above 9,200 feet.
“The habitat at the top of Mount Graham is basically the same as northern
Canada,” said Roger Featherstone, president of the Mount Graham Coalition which works to protect the squirrel and Apache religious rights to the mountain and is part of the new lawsuit.
“The squirrels lived on Mount Graham at the end of the Pleistocene and then got stranded there, kind of like the turtles in the Galapagos islands,” he said. “So the world changed around them and they sat happy on Mount Graham, and now Mount Graham is changing, not only because of climate change but because of the University of Arizona directly in building the telescopes.”
The 8-inch-long squirrels have long been at risk. Wildfires and telescope construction on the top of Mount Graham have destroyed wide areas of the squirrels’ habitat and pushed them to lower elevations and mixed-conifer forests that lack official habitat designation. Hotter, drier conditions from climate change are also believed to be a threat to the squirrels.
In the 1980s, the University of Arizona built a multi-million dollar telescope in the Pinaleños, despite broad pushback from biologists, conservation groups and the San Carlos Apache Tribe, whose members honor the mountain as a sacred site in their culture.
To the San Carlos Apaches, Mount Graham, or Dzil Nchaa Si’An, is a sacred place. Apache people go to the mountain for spiritual journeys and guidance and the tribe says the observatory violates the Native American Religious Freedom Act of 1968 as well as the National Historic Preservation Act.
Many scientists and conservationists say the observatory has been detrimental to the animals and plants in this critical habitat, particularly those on the summit.
The university argued that the area had already been logged and used by people. Bible classes were once held at a camp there every summer. Though the buildings are still there, that camp has been abandoned.
But as part of the initial agreement when the University of Arizona was first proposing to build the telescopes, the structures were to have been removed, which is central to the current lawsuit
Featherstone said the long delay in the structures’ removal is “pure raw political muscle by the University of Arizona. Even though it was part of the agreement with allowing the telescopes that not only the Bible camp but the cabins had to be removed, the Forest Service has never gotten around to doing it.”
The Forest Service, in conjunction with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department, and University of Arizona biologists, has conducted a biennial census of the red squirrel population since 1987, as part of the agreement in building the observatory.
From 1989 to the present, the Mount Graham population has fluctuated, largely because of habitat loss from wildfires and observatory construction, environmentalists argue, as well as dips in the conifer seed crop, the squirrels’ primary food resource.
In 2017, when the Frye Fire swept across the mountain, about 45% of that habitat was lost. The fire scorched about 48,000 acres of the Pinaleño Mountains, including Mount Graham, the highest peak.
Silver said another factor in the loss of habitat was the construction of the Mount Graham International Observatory within the squirrel habitat, despite protests from environmentalists and tribes.
“During the Nuttall Complex Fire, the astronomers were afraid that the fire would burn their telescopes, so they put pressure on firefighters to set a back burn and keep the fire away,” Silver told The Republic in December.
The controlled burn further reduced and fragmented the habitat. During the Frye Fire, not only were trees and plants lost, more than 85% of the estimated 252 red squirrels disappeared. The following fall, the survey found just 35 squirrels living in their mixed conifer forest habitat on the upper 2,000 feet of the mountain.
In response to an April 2019 lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa Audubon, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed that designating additional critical habitat for the Mount Graham red squirrel may be warranted.
The most recent lawsuit argues that the Forest Service should be prohibited from reauthorizing use permits for the summer homes and the former Bible camp on Mount Graham. The suit also wants the agency to begin a formal study of the potential harm to the squirrels from these uses.