Group: Feds hid plan to weaken crane protection
The Biden administration made secret plans to weaken protection for whooping cranes, and documents obtained through an open records request show officials “seem to have been deliberately misleading the public,” an environmental group says.
The documents show that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to propose changing the only natural flock’s status from endangered to threatened, the Center for Biological Diversity said in a news release.
“Whooping cranes have a long way to go on their road to recovery, but with the full protections of the Endangered Species Act they were at least heading in the right direction. Weakening protections at this point would be heartbreaking and would likely undo much of the progress they’ve made so far,” Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at the center, said in an email Tuesday.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether a proposal to “downlist” the crane would be appropriate but has not made such a proposal, the agency said in a statement emailed Tuesday to The Associated Press.
“Whoopers” are the world’s rarest cranes. There are about 500 birds in the natural flock, which was down to 15 in 1941. There also are a total of about 150 in two flocks that authorities are trying to establish in case illness or other disaster hits the original flock, and about 145 in captivity, according to the International Crane Foundation.
The flocks in process are classified “experimental” and are treated as threatened to allow more flexibility in their management.
The federal agency announced in May 2021 that it was reviewing the bird’s status, and the possibility of a downlisting was made public in 2021.