THE WEEK IN WILDLIFE 06/08/2024
An Island Restoration Success Story & A Very Personal Plea to Save the Maple Trees
by Richard Conniff
SEABIRDS SING HOSANNAS FOR ISLAND RESTORATION
Animal rights activists used to grab headlines protesting island restoration projects, because it typically means eradicating goats, pigs, rats, and other introduced species. But those activists mostly mumble to themselves these days. Island restoration projects have turned out to be one of the great nature conservation success stories of our time.
The latest example: Just four years ago, conservationists went to work on Pajaros Uno Island, 13 miles off the coast of Chile. Rare Peruvian diving petrels, locally known as "yuncos," used to nest there, producing a single egg per couple, and otherwise spending most of their lives 100 or more miles offshore feeding in the Humboldt Current.
Early in the 20th century, visiting fishermen accidentally introduced black rats to the island. The rats went on to kill and eat seabird chicks and eggs, as well as the seeds of the island plant life, turning it into a desert. The diving petrels disappeared from the island decades ago. Similar things were happening all along its Pacific Coast habitat, which runs from Chile to Ecuador. Diving petrel populations did a nose dive.
Enter Island Conservation, an international nonprofit, which, over the past 30 years, has restored 200 islands—and the 500 species that were their original inhabitants. (It’s a different way of thinking about animal rights.) On Pajaros Uno, Island Conservation staff found fishermen in the nearby community of Caleta Hornos eager to help, and conditions suggesting restoration was feasible. Using a poison, Brodifacoum, that targeted only the rats, and timing the poisoning to their lifecycle, the project pronounced the island rat-free after just two years, in 2022.
It helped, in the middle of a pandemic, that drones monitored the island with their cameras. In November 2023, having confirmed that the rats were gone, the project was ready to broadcast diving petrel social calls. Less than two weeks later, the first diving petrels returned on the island.
This week, Island Conservation announced that chicks are due to hatch on Pajaros Uno over the next few weeks from at least two active Peruvian diving petrel nests. The total population of these birds coast-wide is now about 80,000, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently upgraded the species from endangered to near threatened.
The bottom line: Payback from environmental restoration projects can begin to show up fast, efficiently, and for a modest price. You just need to plan the work carefully.
BUT ISLANDS ARE STILL …. ISLANDS
Bedout Island, a low-lying coral cay on the northwestern coast of Australia was seabird heaven when researcher Jennifer Lavers started working there in 2016. “I have seen it in all its bird-filled glory,” she says. There were thousands of nesting seabirds, primarily the brown booby (Sula leucogaster), the lesser frigatebird (Fregata ariel), and an endemic subspecies of the masked booby (Sula dactylatra bedouti). Then, in April 2023, the 135-mile-an-hour winds of Cyclone Ilsa, a category 5 tropical cyclone, swept across the 42-acre island and wiped out 80–90% of the bird population. In a helicopter fly-over a few days later, no living birds could be seen. Subsequent visits to the island turned up tens of thousands of seabird carcasses. Some birds died on their nests.
Writing this week in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, Lavery and her co-authors warn: “The frequency and intensity of such storms is likely approaching a threshold beyond which Bedout’s seabirds cannot readily recover, with cyclones hitting the island, on average, every seven years in recent decades.”
It’s not just Bedout, of course. Extreme weather events have recently devastated “wild species and spaces,” killing “thousands of seabirds across a vast area including the Labrador Sea, the waters off Iceland, and the Barents Sea.” In southern California, 10 severe storms in 10 years have repeatedly damaged or destroyed an important kelp forest, with knock-on effects for all the marine species that lived there.
The paper recommends “careful monitoring of seabird demography and recruitment” to determine how well these birds “adapt and recover from the rapid changes ahead.”
BIRD FLU MARCHES ON
The World Health Organization this week announced the death in April of a 59-year-old man in Mexico City, from a type of bird flu virus, H5N2, not previously seen in humans. The victim had other health issues, which had kept him bedridden for three weeks before he began experiencing respiratory issues from the flu virus. The three other recent North American victims of bird flu had all been working in the dairy industry, and contracted the H5N1 virus directly from infected cattle.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the H5N2 subtype had previously been detected “in a backyard poultry farm in Michoacán,” the state bordering the one where the infected person lived.” The new case potentially represents a new source of spillover, and another step in the bird flu’s progress toward broader infectiousness in humans. But testing of people who had contact with the latest victim turned up no cases of either bird flu or COVID.
Also this week, Minnesota became the tenth U.S. state to report a bird flu infection in dairy cattle, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged all states that have reported such infections to test more rigorously and to stop sale of raw milk from infected herds.
SAVE THE MAPLE TREES!
I love maple syrup, which is part of the granola I make for breakfast four days a week. I am at least equally devoted to maple trees, the source of the precious syrup, and of shade, natural habitat for native birds, butterflies, and other species, and, not least, maple helicopters to glue on the noses of small children But maples, along with elms, willows, birches, poplars, horsechestnut, ash, sycamore, and other trees are now under assault by the Asian long-horned beetle.
Since their first discovery in North America in 1996, these beautiful killers have been devastating trees in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, and the Province of Ontario. The remedy can be extraordinarily painful. At one point, Worcester, Massachusetts, a mid-size city, had to remove 27,000 infested trees. But tree removal is often the only way to prevent these invasive beetles from killing the remaining forest-, street- and yard-trees.
The U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has just announced a campaign for this summer to eliminate Asian long-horned beetles from Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and South Carolina. APHIS asks people living in vulnerable areas to help by checking trees for signs of Asian tree beetles and notifying APHIS if you detect them (via phone at 1-866-702-9938 or with an online report). You should also allow APHIS staff to inspect and remove infested trees. Most important, do not carry firewood, nursery stock, woody debris, or lumber from infested trees beyond areas that are already affected. (The areas now under quarantine are Worcester County, Massachusetts; 42.9 square miles in central Long Island, New York; 49 square miles in Clermont County, Ohio; and 76.4 square miles in Charleston and Dorchester counties, South Carolina.)
Author’s note: I’d love to go on about the barred owls that nest in maple tree hollows, and other ecological lore. But let’s stick with what’s really at stake here: It’s the “crunchy granola” recipe published by Mark Bittman years ago in the New York Times—but with certain key modifications that (ahem) must remain proprietary because the result is so fabulous. But I will publish the whole thing next Thursday for paid subscribers. Worth the money! You can become a paid subscriber here:
ADDING UP THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEATHS
Over a 10-year period through 2018, at least 52,480 people in California died prematurely from breathing air pollution produced by wildfires, according to a new analysis in the journal Science Advances. The study put the economic cost at $432 to $456 billion from health impacts alone—that is, not including the massive damage to people’s homes, to their ability to work or play outdoors, or to ecosystems and wildlife, including the survival of threatened and endangered species.
We experienced these effects last summer even here in the very green state of Connecticut, where the skies turned orange with smoke from wildfires in northern Canada. The air filled with the inhalable particulate matter that kills—the stuff that’s 2.5 microns or less across, known as PM2.5 pollution. Sensible people stayed indoors, if they could afford to do so.
Wherever you live, it’s bad stuff, and fossil fuel use is the cause. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated what they politely call “linkages between climate change and increased frequency or severity of fire weather.” In addition to their role in wildfires, every day air pollution from fossil fuels now accounts for 18 percent—almost one in every five—of all deaths worldwide. By that measure, ExxonMobile, Chevron, Saudi Aramco, Sinopec, BP, ConocoPhillips and the rest killed eight million people with their highly profitable products in a single year, 2018.
I apologize for being depressing (or enraging). Try to think about yunco chicks hatching, and let that thought inspire you to get outside this weekend and do what you can to restore threatened wildlife in your own neighborhood.