The Endangered Species Act
— which is being reviewed by Congress this week — is a
soaring success. Just look up.
Look skyward for a while
and you might spy an American bald eagle. Hundreds of them live in
my home state of Montana. Across the United States, the bald eagle
is a living, flying example of what works about the Endangered
Species Act.
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., is
spearheading the effort to change the landmark, 30-year old
anti-extinction law. “The act isn’t working to recover
species now,” Pombo said in a recent speech in Washington State.
“At the same time it has caused a lot of conflicts.”
Mr.
Pombo evidently spends too much time inside his stuffy Washington
office. If he got out in the forests and rivers more, he might know
the story of the bald eagle. The American symbol was listed as
endangered in 1978. That year, surveys turned up only 12 bald eagle
nests in all of Montana. Then, environmental laws such as the
Endangered Species Act and a federal ban on the pesticide DDT
kicked in. They protected the birds from chemical poisoning,
destruction of habitat and needless, wasteful killing.
The results were gradual, but dramatic. By 2005, the number of bald
eagle nests in Montana multiplied by to 300 nests — 25 times
the number before the bird was included on the endangered species
list.
That’s just one state. Eagles were similarly
successful in other states as well. In 1999, the bald eagle’s
status was upgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.” If trends
continue, they will soon be officially recovered and all America
will celebrate.
Today, Montana is one of the top 10
eagle-producing states in the United States. In a recent winter, I
watched more than 30 eagles clean up a carcass in a rancher’s
back pasture. Bald eagle congregations have been tourist
attractions at places like Canyon Ferry and Libby dams, where they
feed on fish in the winter.
No matter how many times I
see a bald eagle on the wing, I am taken aback by its grace and
beauty — and thankful for the Endangered Species Act.
Conflicts over endangered species make headlines. Success
happens in quiet obscurity. But over time, the successes are
dramatic indeed. Gray wolves are another Endangered Species Act
success story in the Northern Rockies. Wiped out by over-zealous
predator control a century ago, wolves began trickling back into
Montana in the 1980s. Now, there are hundreds of wolves in western
Montana, and more in neighboring Idaho and Wyoming. Because Montana
stepped up to the plate and agreed to manage these animals for the
future, the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently handed
wolf management over to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife
and Parks. This is evidence of the flexibility built into the law.
While I don’t like to see any animal needlessly
wasted, I respect that ranchers need to protect their stock to make
a living. The Endangered Species Act has allowed wildlife managers
to kill problem wolves — even wipe out entire packs
—that made a habit of killing livestock. Meanwhile, private
wolf advocacy groups such as Defenders of Wildlife have paid
thousands of dollars to compensate ranchers for stock lost to
wolves and, even more important, helped to resolve conflicts
between wildlife and stockmen.
The grizzly bear is
Montana’s state animal and a symbol of the rugged independent
streak of the West. Yet Yellowstone’s grizzly bear was
sliding toward extinction in the 1970s. Under the Endangered
Species Act, the Yellowstone bear population rebounded from perhaps
as few as 200 in 1974 to perhaps 600 today. Now, experts debate
whether the Yellowstone grizzly is adequately recovered, but all
agree that the Endangered Species Act has been a boon for grizzlies
— and probably saved the Yellowstone grizzly from extinction.
We humans now dominate Planet Earth. We share a
responsibility not to push species into extinction. For 30 years,
the Endangered Species Act has helped keep America the rich and
beautiful land we love. My 17-month-old son loves watching finches
and chickadees at the feeder outside our kitchen window. He will
grow up also watching bald eagles, some perching on a snag close to
our backyard.
What a change: When I was a kid, the only
eagle I ever saw was on the back of a quarter.
Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News. He lives and
writes in Kalispell, Montana.
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