Welcome to my blog.
All tagged USFWS
The day will come when the albatross named Wisdom, the oldest wild bird in the world (by a staggering amount) no longer completes her annual migration to Midway Atoll, never again takes a mate, builds a nest, or starts a family. Today is not that day.
This week the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing four species of giraffes under the Endangered Species Act. Giraffes live in Africa of course, but under the ESA it would be illegal to import any part of a giraffe into the US; the protections would also boost conservation funding for animals in the wild.
This week the Bureau of Land Management finalized plans to protect the Gunnison sage-grouse, a threatened species in western Colorado and eastern Utah.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration, the Department of the Interior, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service – all because of a lizard barely two inches long.
Five axolotls were recently seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as they were being smuggled into the United States. Fortunately for the amphibians, they have been taken in by San Francisco Zoo & Gardens.
The world’s oldest bird, a Laysan albatross named Wisdom, is still strutting her stuff after more than 70 years on Midway Atoll. She has outlived the average life expectancy of seabirds of her kind by a couple decades.
It’s been a rough few years for the Florida manatee, which has suffered shocking population decline along the Sunshine State’s Atlantic coast, due mostly to i poor malnutrition. But 2023 showed a modest but encouraging improvement in both the mortality rate and the health of the seagrass on which these gentle creatures feed.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service wants to enlist shotgun-wielding assassins to kill more than a half million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest. The object: to save the habitat for the invasive birds’ endangered cousins, the northern spotted owl.
This week the Colorado Parks and Wildlife released five gray wolves in the wild, the first phase in the state’s program to establish a permanent, self-sustaining wolf population. The project was set in motion by a 2020 voter referendum demanding the reintroduction of the wolves, which had been eradicated from the state nearly a century ago.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has taken nearly two dozen animal species off of the endangered list, and that’s bad news because it means there’s no hope for them. The animals – one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish, and eight types of mussels – are too far gone to warrant protection.
Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.
The ferruginous pygmy owl, found in the American Southwest and northern Mexico, once again enjoys the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Last month the US Fish and Wildlife Service restored the status of the little hooters after it lost those protections 17 years ago.
Wolverines will likely soon find a home in Colorado – again – as policymakers in the state sort out exactly how they will reintroduce these rare mammals. Much depends on whether the US Fish and Wildlife Service determines that the species will be protected under the Endangered Species Act, a decision it is expected to make in the coming months.
The northern snakehead, an invasive fish from Asia that has been eating its way through the Eastern Seaboard since it first appeared in Maryland two decades ago, was spotted for the first time in Louisiana this week.
The Endangered Species Act turns fifty this year and it has had a pretty good run. Thank Richard Nixon who launched the ESA (along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act).
Good news for the wood stork. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to remove the big bird from the federal list of endangered and threatened species. Forty years ago the wood stork population was down to fewer than 5000 nesting pairs, most of them in south Florida’s Everglades and Big Cypress ecosystems. Today there are twice that number, and the birds have spread to the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
In November, a lone polar bear cub was spotted roaming around Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The US Fish & Wildlife Service sent a team, with a vet from the Alaska Zoo, to check on the young male. They made the rare and difficult decision to capture the cub for his own good.
The situation is going from bad to worse for Florida’s shrinking manatee population: the gentle aquatic mammals are dying by the hundreds, mostly from starvation. A coalition of conservation groups are now petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the manatee as an endangered species, as it once was, with the hope of improving the creature’s habitat.
The odds are stacked against the tiny raptor known as the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl (Glaucidium brasilianum). The owl’s range in the US – in isolated chunks of the southernmost parts of Arizona and Texas – is under siege by development, invasive species, wildfires, and of course climate change.
