Subject: Re: Pocket gophers (was 48)
Date: Nov 9 14:39:30 1995
From: "Steven G. Herman" - hermans at elwha.evergreen.edu


Let's just be very clear about the fact that habitat loss was not what
extirpated the wild California Condor. *That* extirpation was effected
by those allegedly committed to "saving the condor". Before they were
all caged and put in hatcheries, California Condors occupied some of the
wildest country left in California, and they were reproducing at maximum
potential
for the small population that remained. The *researchers* began their
work by killing a nestling condor, and another was killed later by
cyanide from a "coyote-getter" (a baited explosive charge that fires
cyanide crystals into the mouth of an animal interested in the bait) set
out by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the primary federal agency in
charge of the research and the recovery program. Eventually all the
remaining condors were captured, fitted with patagial wing tags and
radios (one of each on each wing), and "monitored" (an absolutely magic
word, sure to make the staunchest environmentalist roll over when it is
dished up by a bureaucrat). Then they began taking the first eggs that
were produced by pairs; eventually they took all the eggs, and all the
condors. One of the last condors "taken into protective custody" was
knocked down thrice by helicopter propwash before it could be picked up.
It died shortly thereafter and the death was blamed on lead poisoning.
But habitat was not the problem. and not the problem "warranting extreme
measures". The fact of the matter is that, when the first National
Audubon Society "researcher" showed up in condor country, in 1965, he was
bound and determined to cage every condor. Alden Miller, the dean of
California ornithology, and Carl Koford, who did his Ph.D. on the
condor in the 1940's, kept that from happening as long as they lived.
Miller died about 1965, and Koford went in 1978. The caging was a bit
controversial for awhile longer, but eventually every two-bit Audubon
chapter in southern California and that vicinity endorsed the caging.
And the cause was helped immeasurably by the fact that one of the big
cheeses at one of the two zoos that got the condors and the big bucks is
Ronald Reagan's Goddaughter! The habitat is still there, and still
damned wild, and the case against lead from deer hunters bullets as the
cause of the decline is incredibly weak.

I may have told this story before, and I'll probably tell it again; it is
one of the most shameful stories in American Conservation, and the whole
thing was and is bankrolled largely with ESA funds. Stand by for the
Peregrine Fund's release of captive bred California Condors in the Grand
Canyon...

Steve Herman

On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, David Wright wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, M. Smith wrote:
> > Real habitat
> > protection/conservation/maintenance is so much more easily done at
> > landscape levels. This high-maintenance, intensive management of days
> > gone by (should be of days gone by anyway) is preposterously expensive
> > when compared to the preventitive measure of managing landscapes.
>
> So should we just let populations such as Kirtland's Warbler and
> California Condor go down the tubes? Do extreme threats not warrant
> extreme measures? And is the current emphasis on "landscapes" (what
> ever happened to tree-fall gaps, by the way?) going to prevent *any*
> more species from becoming threatened by extinction as a result of habitat
> loss? Yes, it makes a lot of sense to avoid habitat loss in the first place
> (hardly a modern revelation), but it does not change the fact that further
> habitat loss which will push more populations to the brink is inevitable,
> regardless of our enlightened status re landscape ecology -- unless human
> society makes some *big* changes, *fast*. The bottom line is that for the
> next few decades, at least, we are going to be faced with the choice of
> using ad hoc measures of varying extremeness to save threatened populations
> or letting them go extinct.
>
> David Wright
> dwright at u.washington.edu
>