Photo: Red-cockaded Woodpecker, Rebecca Vassallo/Great Backyard Bird Count
Send your comments to US Fish and Wildlife Service by December 7
If you have seen the Red-cockaded Woodpecker in Virginia’s Big Woods Wildlife Management Area or have been lucky enough to tour the Nature Conservancy’s Piney Grove Preserve on one of ASNV’s Great Dismal Swamp trips, you know how fragile its survival is. Only intensive management under the Endangered Species Act has allowed them to survive in pockets in the southern United States. Nevertheless, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) on October 8, 2020 proposed to “downlist” the species from “endangered” to “threatened,” which would roll back protections essential to its survival. Prematurely removing those protections could cause loss of the hard-fought gains that resulted from current protections. The proposal is here, and the FWS website also provides a link for submitting comments on the proposal, due by December 7, 2020.
There are a number of disturbing elements to the proposal. The notice proposing downlisting admits that existing populations do not yet meet the criteria identified in the Service’s own protection plan for downlisting. See 85 Fed. Reg. 63,474, at 63,488-489, Oct. 8, 2020. That omission alone should dictate that current protections should continue. The proposal also notes that the majority of populations – 108 out of 124 – are small with “inherently very low or low resiliency” to threats. Populations with fewer than 100 active clusters can decline because of inbreeding, and the notice suggests that only two existing populations are large enough to avoid inbreeding without moving birds from one location to another. (Page 64,480.) And the notice makes very clear that significant threats to populations remain from habitat loss, wildfires, pine beetles, ice storms, tornadoes and hurricanes, all of which can destroy pines used for nesting and destroy or degrade foraging areas. (Page 63,479.)
The proposed downlisting also would result in limiting protections available for the birds as long as their status is “endangered.” Some of the largest existing populations are on military installations. The downlisting proposal would allow those installations to take actions that would halt or reverse recovery trends. Any “incidental take” – unintended harm to the woodpeckers or their nests – resulting from “military training activities on Department of Defense installations with an FWS-approved integrated natural resources management plan” would be permitted. The proposal also would allow a state to substitute its own management plan for the federal standards, and the proposal includes a broad exemption for certain infrastructure activities even if they take place during the species’ breeding season. All of those exemptions undo gains from current management standards. (Page 63,498.)
ASNV will submit comments on the proposal, either individually or by endorsing comments currently being developed by the Southern Environmental Law Center which has been spearheading response to the proposal. FWS is accepting comments on the proposal through December 7. You can submit comments on the proposal here.