by Scott Leslie
So far, the recovery of the species has been a qualified success. While the increase in numbers has been slow, the last full census of the animal was encouraging. DNA analysis of hairs captured on special tape placed at the entrances of wombat burrows showed a total population of 138, a fourfold increase since the 1980s. But it’s still too early for a sigh of relief. Although the historical causes for the species’ decline have been largely removed, the very small population size and single location make the wombats vulnerable to natural catastrophes such as severe drought, flooding, or disease. As insurance against this, a multinational mining company donated money to set up a second location for the species. Located about 700 kilometres south of the current population, the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge in Queensland State received its first few southern hairy-nosed wombats from Epping Forest National Park in late 2009. If successful—and there’s no telling how wild animals will adapt to a new habitat—up to 24 wombats will be moved here.
For the time being, it appears the northern hairy-nosed wombat will avoid the fate of its giant Pleistocene-age predecessor.
IBERIAN LYNX
Wildcats. They range from animals smaller than a typical tabby to the great lions and tigers. They all evolved from the same ancestor in Asia and over millions of years spread across the earth. Of the 36 species on the IUCN Red List, 25 are threatened with extinction. The most endangered large cat of all is the Iberian lynx of Spain: it could be the first one to go extinct since the sabre-toothed tiger disappeared at the close of the last ice age.
In his foreword, Stuart Pimm wrote of an Iberian lynx he saw beside a Spanish lake: “It looked at me just as cats do, with complete contempt, for it belonged there and I didn’t.” Contempt for humans, or whatever the cat equivalent of contempt might be, would be completely justified in the case of this southern European wildcat. In 1900, there may have been 100,000 across the Iberian Peninsula. By 1960, there were only about 4,000 of them left. From there it went quickly downhill: three decades later, about 1,100 remained. Dozens of separate lynx populations were erased from the peninsula in the 1990s. By 2005, there were fewer than 100 adult animals hanging on in two tiny patches of habitat in Spain’s Doñana National Park and the Sierra Morena in Andalusia.
At about 60 centimetres at the shoulder and weighing in at 13 kilograms, the Iberian lynx is smaller than the more northerly and more numerous Eurasian lynx, and about the same size as the Canada lynx of the boreal forests of North America. While it shares the trademark ear tufts, bobbed tail, and long ruff of fur under the chin of the other lynxes, it is distinguished by a much shorter coat, an adaptation to the warmer climate where it lives. The pale orangey-grey fur is adorned with distinctive black spots like a leopard. Its long legs and lithe, feline body are guided through the world by fiery yellow eyes and large ears, the search and detection sensors of a deft nighttime predator.
Typical for a lynx, the Iberian species is a solitary, largely nocturnal hunter whose primary prey is rabbits. Nearly 100 percent of its natural diet is made up of the quickly reproducing rodents, which it stalks in an ecosystem of open woodland and dense shrub thickets. This near-total dependence on one prey species for survival is a risky way to get a living, though, and has been the downfall of many a highly specialized predator. For example, snail kites in the Everglades and black-footed ferrets on the Great Plains are both teetering on the edge of oblivion because of the dwindling of their exclusive prey species—apple snails and prairie dogs respectively. Likewise the lynx. The rabbit population on the Iberian Peninsula has collapsed dramatically since the 1950s, itself the victim of overhunting and habitat destruction, but mostly owing to the misguided, one might say intensely stupid, actions of one man.
Paul Felix Armand-Delille, a doctor and bacteriologist, had a problem with rabbits in the gardens on his estate in northern France. After reading about the success of the myxoma virus in killing off hundreds of millions of destructive introduced rodents in Australia, Armand-Delille thought he’d use the virus to get rid of his rabbits, even though they were part of the native wildlife. In 1952, the doctor deliberately and illegally—he was later convicted and heavily fined—infected two rabbits with myxomatosis and loosed them upon his estate, hoping they would spread the disease to others. It worked: Armand-Delille was quickly rid of his long-eared garden irritants. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stop there. Did he release the disease, not expecting it to go beyond the confines of his own land? It is hard to believe a scientist wouldn’t know better. A little over a year later, the virus had spread clear across France, killing 90 percent of the country’s rabbits. By the following year, it had spread to the rest of western Europe, including Spain, where it was decimating the wild rabbit population, the primary food source for Iberian lynx. This marked the beginning of a precipitous decline of both the rabbit and consequently the lynx populations. But the dominoes didn’t stop falling there. The Spanish imperial eagle, once a fixture in Iberian skies, specialized in hunting rabbits too. Its population reached a low of about 30 pairs in the 1960s, also owing largely to starvation caused by a dearth of its primary prey. Fortunately, the eagle’s story might still have a happy ending: after decades of intensive management, the majestic raptor’s current population is about 400, and it has been downlisted from endangered to vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
A female lynx with her two or three cubs need to eat three rabbits per day for nearly a year until the young are independent. With so few of the rodents surviving the epidemic of myxomatosis and another more recent deadly disease, Iberian lynxes were forced to turn to mice, rats, waterfowl, partridges, and deer to survive. But there just wasn’t enough of this kind of prey to sustain thousands of large wildcats, and the lynx’s population crashed. Lynx also killed red foxes and feral house cats, not to eat but to eliminate as competitors for an ever-diminishing supply of food.
The reasons behind any potential extinction are rarely simple. The decline of the Iberian lynx—albeit at a much slower rate—began long before Dr. Armand-Delille’s crime nearly wiped out Europe’s rabbits. Centuries of overhunting; the loss of almost all of its natural woodland-scrub habitat to agricultural, pine, and eucalyptus plantations; the building of vacation homes; road construction; road kills; and habitat flooding by dams had also taken a heavy toll on the cat. As recently as 1960, the Iberian lynx ranged across about 60,000 square kilometres, or 10 percent, of Spain. Today, just a half century later, its entire world breeding range is just 124 square kilometres, an area no bigger than New England’s Nantucket Island. What’s more, this area is divided between two widely separated parcels, splitting an already tiny population into two even smaller, reproductively isolated ones.
This is not to say all hope is lost for the lynx. After all, another endangered predator, the Iberian wolf, today boasts a population in the thousands after a sustained recovery effort by conservationists. It too stood on the brink of extinction, and in 1970 just a few hundred remained. They suffered severe habitat loss as well, not to mention “wolf persecution,” an irrational hatred of wolves among European peoples that has historically triggered widespread poisoning, trapping, and shooting, often for no more than the “sport” of it. (How can such acts of violence against the wild counterparts of our beloved domestic companions be justified? They can’t.) Although Iberian wolves didn’t face starvation like the lynx—because they evolved eating a wide variety of foods and weren’t dependent on any one species—they overcame tough odds and came back. Their story and the recovery of the Spanish imperial eagle must spur on those who work for the lynx.
Indeed, the Iberian lynx has made some progress. The species is now fully protected from hunting, although individuals are still occasionally killed illegally. In 2005, the first cubs were born in captivity to a female named Saliega, a positive start to the breeding program. By 2010, there were nearly 80 animals in captivity (though many of them have contracted a serious kidney disease), living at three facilities in Spain and at a new breeding ce
ntre in Portugal, a country where the species was wiped out decades ago. Former lynx habitats have been set aside for repopulation. In 2009 and 2010, seven animals were translocated from Sierra Morena in southern Andalusia to a wilderness in the state of Cordoba to the north; they were the first Iberian lynx ever to be reintroduced into former habitat. The goal is to add another 20 over the next several years, while also releasing cats into a second, separate habitat. As well, an attempt has been made to conserve and recover the wild rabbit population in Doñana National Park, and although as yet unsuccessful, it represents an important part of creating sustainable conditions for the cat. Today, about 200 Iberian lynx live in the wild, up from a 100 or fewer in 2005.
CALIFORNIA CONDOR
An icon of endangered species, this magnificent bird is a reminder of a very different time long past when great throngs of wildlife roamed throughout North America.
During the Pleistocene age, about 13,000 years ago, North America’s vast savannah-steppe ecosystem was alive with big animals. Camels, large-headed llamas, long-horned bison, Columbian mammoths, four-horned pronghorns, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, American lions, and scimitar cats roamed the plains in great numbers. The scene rivalled the great legions of animals on today’s African Serengeti.
Among the Pleistocene megafauna was the California condor, which appears to have been relatively common from the Pacific Ocean across the vast plains and almost to the east coast. It shared the sky with two even more massive condor-like species, known as teratorns. The largest, dubbed the “incredible teratorn” by paleontologists, had a wingspan of five metres. Expert scavengers, the three condor species thrived on the carcasses of large mammals. Many of these giant animals went extinct some 10 millennia ago, likely overhunted by humans or wiped out by a massive event such as a meteor impact (the latest evidence, a large crater recently found in western Nova Scotia, suggests the latter). With no more megafauna, the teratorns’ food supply was greatly reduced, and they soon died out themselves. But the California condor lived on, its range shrinking to the far west of the continent, where it survived by feeding on the carcasses of marine mammals along the Pacific coast. Today, its remaining range is made up of scrubby desert, canyons, and open grasslands in very limited areas of the southwestern United States. Though still around, the condor barely survives—but with the help of caring people, it is fighting back.
This dark bird with its bare orange head soars hundreds of metres above the earth on steady wings that stretch nearly 300 centimetres from tip to tip, scanning the ground for dead animals. Despite its size, it takes no live food. It is only occasionally the first species at a carcass, usually locating its food from the air by watching for turkey vultures, ravens, and golden eagles feeding on the ground. The condor doesn’t use its sense of smell to find carrion. This is in contrast to its smaller cousin, the turkey vulture, which possesses the keenest sense of smell of any bird. Because of their enormous size, condors will drive other scavenging birds away from a carcass—that is, except for golden eagles, which, despite being only half as large, keep the giants at bay. Such timidity toward eagles is reserved only for scavenging situations, however: a condor will vigorously chase away eagles and any other birds that approach its nesting area.
Listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, the population of California condors reached an all-time low of just 22 birds in 1981. Habitat destruction, overhunting, and persecution by ranchers had pushed the species to the edge. And a scavenging lifestyle caused many condors to die of lead and strychnine poisoning after eating bullet- and shot-ridden carcasses or from eating coyotes and other animals that were deliberately poisoned. By 1987, the last six condors in the wild had to be taken into captivity in a last-ditch effort to save the species under the US Endangered Species Act. They did well in captivity, with numbers growing to 150 by 1998. In the early 1990s, a program to release captive-bred condors into the wild was begun.
By 2003, the first California condor chick to be born and reared in the wild since 1981 took flight, and since then several more wild chicks have fledged. In late 2010, there were almost 400 birds in total, 200 of them in captivity. And the species’ horizons are widening beyond its initial southern California and Grand Canyon strongholds. A pair of condors recently attempted to nest in northern California’s Big Sur for the first time in a century. In Mexico, the second reintroduced condor chick to be born in that country hatched in 2009.
With about $35 million spent so far by the US government, the California condor’s has been one of the most expensive endangered species recovery programs in history. It has its critics. They say that the bird should be left to its own devices, that too much is being spent on it at the expense of other endangered species, and that it may be doomed to extinction anyway. Valid arguments, perhaps. But in an age when Hollywood blockbuster movies routinely cost over $100 million to make and elite professional athletes sign contracts for $50 million, is it too much to ask for some generosity for one of the most magnificent species of birds this good earth has ever produced?
WHOOPING CRANE
Coming close to the California condor in the amount of effort and money spent to ensure its survival is another majestic North American species. Imagine a bird with a snow-white body, black wing tips and a red crown, standing as tall as a man’s chest, with wings that could span a small room. The whooping crane—named for its powerful bugling call—is a most spectacular and extremely rare bird.
Once numbering as many as 10,000 birds, this species had become a mere ghost of its former self. Historically found across much of North America, from the subarctic to northern Mexico, merciless hunting and habitat destruction in the 1800s and early part of the 20th century almost drove the whooping crane to extinction. In 1941, only 21 “whoopers” were left: 15 migratory birds and 6 in a sedentary population in Louisiana. By 1949, the Louisiana birds were gone, wiped out by severe weather.
The few surviving birds still had to run a perilous 4,000-kilometre gauntlet of migration as they followed a centuries-old route down the middle of the continent in the fall, only to retrace it again in spring. On the way to their Texas Gulf Coast winter home from breeding grounds at Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada’s North (it wasn’t until 1954 that this, the species’ last nesting place, was finally found) they would encounter the gunfire of farmers, whose few bits of grain they might nibble on. Somehow this tiny population of cranes dodged a bullet for another two decades, until the late 1960s, when an intense cooperative recovery program between the United States and Canada gradually brought the species back from the brink. Whooping cranes dodged yet another bullet in 2010 when their wintering site at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast was spared the effects of the infamous BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
One of the most publicized species recovery campaigns of the 20th century has had marked success: today, there are 263 migratory birds plying the skies between Wood Buffalo National Park and the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Moreover, a small non-migratory Louisiana population has been re-established, and the species has been reintroduced into a former breeding area in central Wisconsin. These two populations account for about 140 birds. Add another 167 birds in captivity and the whooping crane’s total population is approaching 600. Though the current population is still small, and their long-term survival remains firmly in the hands of humans, this majestic bird’s rise from near ashes inspires hope for those working for other imperilled creatures.
SHORT-TAILED ALBATROSS
The fact that the impressively sized California condor, whooping crane, and short-tailed albatross are among the most endangered birds on earth, yet are now on the comeback trail, suggests a paradox: though we seem particularly inclined on the one hand to destroy the most remarkable of living things, on the other, we fight the hardest to save them.
Ten million short-tailed albatross once glided above the waves across 35 million square kilometres of North Pacific Ocean, f
rom Japan to North America, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Hawaiian Islands. These large, eight-and-a-half-kilogram white birds with a generous bubble-gum pink bill and a wingspan reaching over two metres, were once the most abundant albatross and the largest seabird in all the northern hemisphere.
The defining characteristic of the true seabirds, like the short-tailed albatross, is their nomadic, oceanic life. They are as much marine creatures as are whales and fish. Species such as albatrosses and shearwaters, which spend most of their lives foraging on the high seas, can travel great distances with minimal effort by taking advantage of the winds. Next to food supply, wind probably effects their movement and distribution more than anything else, especially between 35 and 60 degrees latitude, where it blows almost continuously. On long, slender wings, short-tailed albatrosses soar just above the water, beating their wings only occasionally to maintain lift, taking advantage of updrafts created as air currents deflect off the faces of waves. This uses much less energy than flapping flight and enables the birds to travel the vast distances they need to gather food. An individual bird might routinely cover hundreds of thousands of square kilometres during the non-breeding season in its search for surface-schooling fish and squid.