fieldnotes

• Forestry
• Recycling
• Migration
• Chapter Spotlight
• Centennial
• Some Sport
• Saved by a Shrunken Head
• Gardening in the Buff
• Fish on Prozac
• Smuggling Down Under
• All Politics Is Local

Forestry
Gardening for Ivory-Bills

There's been a lot of talk about a second chance for the ivory-billed woodpecker. The way things look now, it might need a third chance. A growing demand for cypress mulch in recent years has led to increased logging of cypress trees in areas the ivory-bill once roamed, particularly in Florida and Louisiana. Much of Louisiana's nearly one million acres of coastal swamp forest is being targeted for logging, says Barry Kohl, conservation chair of the Louisiana Audubon Council. Kohl adds that timber companies are buying up as much private property as possible to, in the end, produce small bags of mulch that sell for $2 a pop at Home Depot, Lowe's, and Wal-Mart. Although cypress is advertised as high-quality mulch, environmental groups say pine bark, pine straw, and even leaves work just as well. "A lot of people spend a lot of money [for this mulch]," says Cathy Coates, the conservation chairperson at the Baton Rouge Audubon Society, "when they could just put down leaves from their own garden."

Among the dozens of animal species besides the ivory-bill that depend on bottomland forests for habitat are black bears, bald eagles, swallow-tailed kites, numerous wading birds, and most eastern neotropical migrants. But Louisiana residents also depend on cypress forests as the last line of defense against rising sea levels that have already engulfed more than a million acres of coastal marshes since the 1930s. Higher water levels flood forests, preventing the growth of new cypress trees because their seeds can't germinate in standing water. A recent report commissioned by the state of Louisiana concludes that much of the coastal forest will either never regenerate or will do so only artificially, through plantings. Yet no agency has ever distinguished at-risk forests from those that will grow back naturally. "We need to qualify those areas," says William H. Conner, a coauthor of the report and a scientist at Clemson University. "My speculation is that if we log it all now and depend on natural regeneration, then we're not going to get a lot back." There is also no age limit to which trees can be cut; rare old-growth trees—a few of which have stood since before the time of Columbus—are often felled for lumber while smaller trees are ground up into mulch.

With the Gulf of Mexico lapping up more than 16,000 acres of Louisiana annually, one U.S. Senate committee drafted the Water Resources Development Act of 2005 earlier this year. It would give the state nearly $2 billion for coastal restoration. That money is expected to prevent about 60 percent of land losses that would otherwise take place over the next 50 years. But the act also includes a provision—slipped in by Senator David Vitter (R-LA)—that would remove the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' powers to regulate flood hazards and threats to conservation and wildlife in navigable waters on private property. Theoretically, then, the provision would allow for more logging along lakes, rivers, and the coast. "It's absolutely crazy to consider cutting down cypress trees at the same time you're talking about restoring the coast of Louisiana," Coates says.

— By Jesse Greenspan

Recycling
Mixed (Garbage) Bag

More and more, blue recycling bins are joining trash cans at the ends of American driveways. From 1990 to 2003 recycling rates in the United States almost doubled, from 16.2 percent of total trash to 30.6 percent. There were improvements in nearly every category of solid waste. The average American produces 4.5 pounds of garbage each day, more than 3 pounds of which are sent to landfills or combustion facilities. The mountain of refuse we generate is expanding—from 205 million tons in 1990 to a record 236 million tons in 2003. Recycling rates for some items—glass and aluminum, in particular—have fallen since 1995. Of the billion aluminum beverage cans purchased annually, three-quarters of a million tons of empties end up in landfills or incinerators. Recycling of beverage containers has declined during the past 10 years, partly due to contamination caused by mixing recyclables in curbside containers, the absence of bottle buyback centers, and the lack of bottle deposits on noncarbonated beverages such as sports drinks.

— By Jesse Greenspan

Migration
A Path to the Future

Every autumn for at least 7,000 years, pronghorn antelope have departed the sagebrush flats in what is now Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, setting out on a 270-mile round-trip journey between their winter habitat in the Upper Green River Valley and their summer range at the foot of the Teton Mountains. "The migration is an amazing testament to persistence and a remarkable tale of natural history so rare in the modern world," says Joel Berger, an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society who has been studying the ancient trek. Of land mammals, he says, only the Porcupine Caribou Herd, which resides for part of the year in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, migrates a longer distance in the Western Hemisphere.

Yet today, Berger worries, the pronghorns may be living on borrowed time, as one of the largest ever natural gas energy booms, taking place on a rolling mesa known as the Pinedale Anticline, threatens to sever their passageway. Thousands of natural gas wells on U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tracts are sprouting on the anticline and in nearby Jonah Field, an area ecologists call "a North American winter Serengeti" for the 100,000 antelope, elk, mule deer, and whitetail deer that gather there. "It is now clear that if we don't do something to halt the deterioration of the corridor, we could have a subpopulation of antelope becoming extinct in a national park," says biologist Franz Camenzind, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance.

As a solution, Berger has proposed creating a new kind of refuge, a corridor for long-distance migrants. Naming their concept the Path of the Pronghorn, Berger and Steve Cain of Grand Teton National Park have won support from a number of federal agencies—including the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service—to set aside a winding, development-free corridor 90 miles long and roughly a mile wide.

Like traditional wildlife refuges and scenic river corridors, the Path of the Pronghorn represents the next step in modern ecological thinking by recognizing the special habitat requirements of mammals that migrate across long distances between vital summer and winter range. Berger says that 92 percent of the corridor would cross public land, and the remaining 8 percent would need approval from private landowners.

So far the BLM, which has been under tremendous pressure from both industry and the Bush administration to allow gas production's wide expansion, has not taken an official position. But Wyoming-based BLM biologist Steve Belinda, who is trying to juggle gas development and wildlife needs, says, "I can tell you as a private citizen who cares about wildlife that anything like this, which takes a creative, foresighted approach to wildlife conservation, is something that should be given serious attention."

— By Todd Wilkinson

Chapter Spotlight
On the Lookout

It was on an early spring day last year that Steve Schubert of the Morro Coast Audubon Society set off with colleagues and family members into central California's Santa Lucia Wilderness Area. Clearing the trail of brush and poison oak as they went along, they made their way past a pair of nesting prairie falcons into Hi Valley, then up to an observation point to view a known peregrine aerie in the cliffs across an intervening canyon. Schubert scanned the cliffs with his binoculars. "I found myself saying, 'Oh, my God, there is a condor in a cave!' " he recalled. The bird, Condor B168—identified by the numbers on its wing tag and by telephoto lens and videotaping—is an eight-year-old male that had been released by the Ventana Wilderness Society.

The history of Morro Coast Audubon, chartered in 1967, is spiced with tales of service and adventure. Schubert (above), an environmental educator who joined the chapter more than 30 years ago, when he was a biology major in college, is a past chapter president. He and Kevin Cooper of the U.S. Forest Service are cofounders of the Hi Mountain Condor Lookout Project, which now involves several agencies and institutions in tracking the wide-ranging condors. Here, in the Santa Lucia wilderness, the chapter is repeating its pioneering work in identifying vital bird habitat and helping reestablish endangered species.

The best known of Morro Coast Audubon's projects is its long-running peregrine nest watch. By the 1960s the falcons' population had crashed in the United States, their eggshells thinned by DDT residues. Biologists then knew of only two nesting pairs on the California coast, one of them in a pothole cave on Morro Rock, an eroded volcanic neck emerging from the sea off the small city of Morro Bay, about 200 miles up the coast from Los Angeles.

In 1967 chapter volunteers began monitoring the nest around the clock. The nest guards returned, along with the falcons, year after year, resulting in much behavioral data and the occasional arrest of poachers scaling the rock with climbing equipment. For a time during the late 1970s and early 1980s the California Department of Fish and Game paid for a full-time warden. But as nest failures threatened the continuing existence of the aerie, chapter volunteers cooperated with the Peregrine Fund in various projects to stimulate peregrine reproduction on the rock, including the placement of captive-bred chicks in the nest. Falcons that had fledged at Morro Rock spread across California, helping to rebuild the state's once-decimated population, now estimated at more than 250 breeding pairs.

"The falcon pair at Morro Rock successfully hatched, reared, and fledged two young in 1993, the first nesting attempt there without human intervention in 16 years," Schubert says proudly. "Last year there were two active aeries on the rock. Each fledged young—noteworthy because in California peregrines don't usually tolerate another peregrine nesting pair nearby."

— By Frank Graham Jr.

On July 8, 1905, Guy Bradley was shot to death at Oyster Keys, just south of Flamingo, at the tip of the Florida Everglades. The Audubon warden was trying to arrest a notorious plume hunter. The world he knew has changed a lot since then, of course. In that long-ago era plume birds such as herons and egrets faced extinction from the guns of hunters who sold their feathers to makers of stylish hats for stylish women. The wardens, too, faced those guns. Today Bradley's beat has been preserved in part as Everglades National Park. "Birds are not being poached here anymore," says David King, Florida Bay district ranger. "The problem today is human disturbances—fishermen who want to get into the waters around the nesting areas. Noise and proximity—these are the threats." Guy Bradley would have shaken his head at the nature of bird protection these days, but he would probably have appreciated the festivities recently held in his honor. Guy Bradley Day, sponsored by the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Audubon of Florida, featured tours of the Guy Bradley Trail (a one-mile jaunt along the shore of Florida Bay), among other events. At the day's closing ceremonies, Ed Carlson, director of Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, saluted Bradley: "Guy, every wildlife lover that has raised a pair of binoculars to their eyes over the last 100 years owes a debt of gratitude to you. Your sacrifice has enriched the lives of millions."

— By Stuart McIver

© 2005 National Audubon Society
 

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