The Week in Wildlife 05/25/24
The Rivers Run Empty; Big Plans for Sage Grouse & Wolverines. PLUS: How to Talk to an AntiVaxxer
By Richard Conniff
EMPTYING THE FORESTS, THE RIVERS, & THE SKIES
We already know about the reported “insect apocalypse.” We see it first hand when we come back from a long drive with far fewer dead insects spattered across the windshield than in recent memory. (That’s called “the windshield effect,” and, yes, there is a sad irony in knowing a group of animals is dwindling only because we no longer kill as many of them. But maybe you’ve also noticed that monarch butterflies have disappeared from our lives?) Vertebrate populations are likewise said to be down by half since 1970, though that report has come under criticism. The bird population of North America has declined by three billion birds over the same period.
Now a coalition of environmental groups reports that freshwater migratory fish populations have experienced “a staggering 81% collapse” in monitored populations “on average between 1970 to 2020, including catastrophic declines of 91% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 75% in Europe.”
This Living Planet Index (LPI) report comes from a consortium of conservation groups, including the World Fish Migration Foundation, the Zoological Society of London, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and the World Wildlife Fund.
The decline, according to the press release, is mainly a result of “habitat loss and degradation –-including fragmentation of rivers by dams and other barriers and conversion of wetlands for agriculture.” Over exploitation, increasing pollution, and climate change have all aggravated the damage.
It sounds bad for the future of freshwater migratory fish. But the press release also notes that “nearly one-third of monitored species have increased, suggesting that conservation efforts and improved management can have positive impacts. Some promising strategies include the improved and/or species-focused management of fisheries, habitat restoration, dam removals, the creation of conservation sanctuaries, and legal protection.”
All this—the insects, the birds, the vertebrates at large, and the fish—drive home the need for every one of us to make a difference. For you, maybe it means focusing your efforts on restoring a particular waterway, or minimizing the grassy lawn around your house to focus on plants pollinators need. Maybe it means getting out of your car and commuting, or campaigning to get local schools to swap out aging gas and oil boilers for heat pumps to reduce climate change damage. Maybe it means joining the fight to remove a dam or build a fish ladder. Think about the possibilities.
I’m thinking, too. Since I got started writing about wildlife in the mid-1970s, I’ve tended to avoid politics, and I’ve refrained from pushing the conservation message too hard. I’ve worked on the short-sighted theory that love of the natural world was enough, and the conservation would follow. Magazines call the kind of features I write “evergreen” stories, meaning they had no news hook. You could read them the day they were published, or 50 years later, and the experience would be about the same.
One big difference: In the meantime, many of the animals I was describing vanished.
A CHANCE TO SAVE SAGE GROUSE?
Here’s a way to start making a difference over the next three weeks, from now till June 13. That’s the remaining window for public comments on a draft plan announced in March by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for the 67 million acres of land it manages. The plan could limit energy development and livestock grazing across 10 western states to protect the rapidly declining population of greater sage grouse. For Sierra magazine, Alison Harford reports:
The “sagebrush sea,” spanning much of the Intermountain West, is the largest terrestrial ecosystem in the lower 48 states—but a 2022 US Geological Survey report found that over the last 20 years, an average of 1.3 million acres of sagebrush have been lost or degraded annually. Greater sage-grouse populations are suffering because of this: From 1965 to 2021, their numbers plummeted by nearly 80 percent. According to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), populations once in the millions now number fewer than 800,000.
You can read about BLM’s proposed management plan here. Energy interests of course oppose any limits. But you’re presumably reading this because you are on the side of the sage grouse. Harford reports:
… some wildlife conservation groups say the proposed restrictions don’t go far enough. “The draft proposal still allows for oil and gas drilling, mining, and other activities—some of the biggest threats to the bird’s habitat,” said Vera Smith, senior federal lands policy analyst with Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement. “We need a drastic departure from the BLM’s approach of whittling away at the last best places for the sage-grouse.”
Your assignment: Read the plan, give it some thought, and add your comment here on behalf of the sage grouse between now and June 13.
COLORADO MAKES ROOM FOR WOLVERINES
Last week, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a law recognizing insects and other invertebrates as wildlife and enabling state wildlife workers to conserve them. And this week, he put his signature on a bill to reintroduce wolverines to the state and allocate $750,000 from the Species Conservation Trust Fund for the task.
Wolverines are big, snow-loving, cold-seeking weasels. They weigh 44 pounds on average in North America, and they are known for their ferocious personalities. The University of Michigan, which calls its teams Wolverines, once had the idea to bring two live wolverine mascots on leashes onto the football field to greet the Navy team’s mascot, a goat. Fortunately for the goat, the ceremonial greeting got scrubbed when the wolverines tried to greet their student handlers instead.
Alone in the Rocky Mountains, on the other hand, wolverines will do just fine, at least until climate change makes the world much hotter for all of us. From the Center for Biological Diversity:
Colorado Parks and Wildlife began assessing the viability of reintroducing wolverines in the 1990s. Since then, Colorado's pristine high alpine habitat has only become more important for the species as climate change decreases snowpack across the animal’s current and lower elevation ranges in North America.
Wolverines were federally listed as threatened in November under the Endangered Species Act after more than a decade of litigation and advocacy by the Center and allies.
“We only have about 325 wolverines left in the lower 48 states, so this bill is a vital lifeline for these tenacious animals,” said [Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director for the Center]. “We’re hopeful that wolverines will soon be thriving in their native high alpine habitat. With climate change pressures pushing them further to the brink, this reintroduction can't come soon enough.”
ANOTHER HUMAN CASE OF BIRD FLU
Public health officials reported this country’s third human case of bird flu, in a farm worker in Michigan. The victim experienced mild symptoms, as in the previous two human cases (in Colorado in 2022, and Texas this year). The telltale symptom was conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, with lab tests subsequently confirming the diagnosis.
“The current health risk to the general public remains low," Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan's chief medical executive, said in a news release. "We have not seen signs of sustained human-to-human transmission at this point. This is exactly how public health is meant to work, in early detection and monitoring of new and emerging illnesses.”
I’ve added italics to Dr. Bagdasarian’s quote above as a reminder that well-funded state public health agencies are key to keeping us save from infectious diseases. That’s worth remember because underfunding these agencies, and ignoring their advice, is now standard among right-wingers.
At this point, bird flu occurrences in humans look more like a trickle than a spillover. But farmers and state agriculture officials have resisted routine testing. That means other cases may be going undetected in both livestock and the people who tend them. The pathogen’s adaptation to mammal hosts is relatively recent. But bird flu has already caused mass die offs in seals. Human deaths occurred in 2023 in Cambodia and China.
HOW TO TALK TO AN ANTI-VAXXER
I woke up yesterday morning to an email from my old friend Virginia Tyson. (We’re both old, having graduated from college together in 1973.) The story she told seems to me to be the perfect way to talk to anti-vaxxers:
I was taking a Lyft ride from L.A. to Glendale for a post-op checkup of my cataract surgery. My driver seemed pretty normal, chatting about statistics and things. But then he brought up vaccinations: "Everybody has the freedom to choose whether or not to be vaccinated, right?"
Well sort of. So I reminded him that they endangered other people by not being vaccinated. (I should talk, because I hate getting shots.)
Anyway, I pointed out that I had grown up in Houston, which was the land of mosquitoes and fevers and polio when I was a child. I pointed out that I was from the generation that was first to escape the scourge of polio. I told him we had had no choice ... you got vaccinated and mothers were happy to drag their squalling children to get jabbed (painfully) in the arm if it meant they would be safe from polio. I think most people have forgotten what it looked like.
This poor driver had to hear me go on about the children in braces with withered legs. He had no idea who Jonas Salk was despite the fact that the Salk Institute is in La Jolla. (Well, that's not a suburb of L.A., so. ...) I also told him about my cousin Charles, who as a child was in an iron lung in the polio ward of the Los Angeles County hospital. It was pretty tragic. He was separated from his siblings (he was the youngest) and my aunt had to stand in the parking lot and yell to him through a window. Parents were not allowed to have contact because of the fear of contagion. He survived it and eventually ran track at UCLA. Sadly, in his 40s, he developed breathing problems and had a trach tube (I think that's what it was) in his throat that he periodically had to press, to release a buildup of air. It would hiss when he touched it.
The poor driver seemed dumbfounded by all this. I guess people do have to be reminded. He of course was much younger than us, so the idea of crippled children and iron lungs left him speechless. I sometimes forget how scary some parts of our childhoods were.
That’s it. Next time you meet an anti-vaxxer, or just some well-meaning but vaccine-hesitant parent … hold the polemics and just render them speechless with terrible memories of what life was like in the painful era before vaccines.
P.S. If this seems like a leap from my focus here on wildlife, I make no apologies. Almost all of our infectious diseases derive from our close connection to other species. And vaccinations don’t just protect us, but also our domestic animals, and thus the wildlife around us.