When the red fox expanded its range and moved into
coastal California in the 1980s, wildlife managers relied on
leghold traps to stop the clever predators from killing endangered
marsh birds such as the California clapper rail and California
least tern. Without the traps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
said, the red fox could wipe out entire populations of ground
nesters.
Then in 1998, California voters banned
leghold traps. Now, the National Audubon Society and other groups
have gone to court to bring them back.
“If we
didn’t sue to overturn this law, the next year’s crop of endangered
birds might be the last crop,” says Gordon Bennett of the Marin
Audubon Society. “It’s an urgent situation.”
The
population of shorebirds, already suffering from coastal
development, had plummeted before red fox were trapped. On one
marsh, a population of California clapper rails numbered 173 in
1981, then dropped to just nine birds a decade later. Once trapping
red fox began, the bird population rose to more than 100, says
Marge Kolar, the manager of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife
Refuges.
“We have upset the balance of nature and
sometimes we have to take steps that bring us back closer to that
balance,” Kolar says.
The Animal Protection
Institute is fighting the lawsuit against what is known as
Proposition 4. The institute’s Dena Jones says they’ve asked the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to swap padded leghold traps for
other, more humane traps. Kolar says that wouldn’t work: Other
traps kill native gray foxes, he says, and “they’re not causing a
problem.”
*Dustin
Solberg
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline To trap or not?.
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