Wood Stork Rebounds, Thanks to People Management

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell

Last week. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the official "downlisting" of the wood stork from endangered to threatened. Personally I would have called the status change an upgrade, since that is indeed what it is.

Sec. Jewell made the announcement at Georgia's Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, which now hosts the largest single wood stork rookery in the U.S., with about 400 breeding pairs. That's great news, of course. Even better news is that this large colony represents only about 3.5 percent of all the breeding pairs in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, according to last year's census. This year's numbers are looking even better. 

Consider that in 1978, there were just 2,695 nesting pairs, all confined to Georgia and Florida, and these numbers are remarkable indeed. When the wood stork officially made the endangered list in 1984, scientists were seriously concerned that the bird could go extinct by 2000.

Wood stork happy dance

The wood stork's decline was primarily due to destruction of the birds' traditional nesting habitat in southern Florida. The construction of canals, levees and floodgates in the Everglades effectively eliminated most of the wetlands necessary to provide food for these large wading birds. 

The Department of Interior officially credits determined efforts on the part of federal, state and private parties to protect and restore wetlands elsewhere in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. I believe equal credit has to go to the wood storks themselves, which set out from their destroyed homelands and found new places to perpetuate themselves, hundreds of miles from south Florida.

Bald eagle, no longer endangered

I don't mean to take anything away from the many people who have worked to protect and restore wetlands and who came up with innovative ways to ensure nesting success for the storks. We humans are quite as capable of patting ourselves on the back for correcting our environmental mistakes as we are for making those mistakes in the first place. The whole notion of "wildlife management" strikes me as somewhat absurd, actually. The best wildlife managers on the planet are and always have been wildlife themselves.

Until the largely hairless bipedal mammalian Homo sapiens showed up on the third planet from the sun a few hundred thousand years ago, wildlife populations managed themselves quite nicely by behaving appropriately within their assigned link of the food chain. Human intrusion into these food chains has invariably had devastating consequences. 

It has only been in the past 50 years that humans have begun making real efforts to undo some of the devastating changes they have inflicted and continue to inflict on the planet and its other inhabitants. Rachel Carson's watershed book Silent Spring was published in 1962 and awakened Americans to the damage the pesticide DDT was causing to populations of eagles, ospreys, pelicans, falcons and other birds.

Osprey, sitting pretty

When I first moved to the South Carolina Lowcountry in 1972, bald eagles and ospreys were rare enough that a sighting was worth a newspaper story. Both birds, along with brown pelicans and the American alligator, were among the first animals listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when it was finally enacted in1973. That law authorized federal agencies to regulate activities that could cause further harm to species that were literally in danger of going extinct in the foreseeable future. 

(As an aside, it was Republican President Richard M. Nixon who urged Congress to pass the ESA, declaring that existing laws to prevent extinction were inadequate. Can you imagine any Republican saying such a thing today?)

Critics of the ESA insist that the law is not effective because very few species have been taken off the list once they get on it. But bald eagles, ospreys, brown pelicans, American alligators and peregrine falcons have all been removed from the list because they have recovered sufficiently due to efforts supported by the ESA. Perhaps in a few years wood storks will also come off the list entirely. 

Brown pelican, populations soaring

What may be more telling is that since the law went into effect in 1973, 99 percent of the species that have been listed have not gone extinct in spite of the efforts of powerful lobbies that fight tooth and nail to prevent application of the law.

What I find interesting about the success stories is that the solutions have been relatively simple. Do nothing (i.e., don't cut down critical forest habitats, don't drain swamps, don't poison the planet, etc.) or take positive actions to restore what we've already damaged (i.e., restore wetlands, plant long term (not just harvestable) forests, find new and safe ways to deal with pests, etc.). In other words, let the wildlife manage themselves and give them enough space to do so. 

There is hope for this wood stork youngster

That has been the idea behind marine sanctuaries and marine protected areas, for example. Some animals that were in serious danger of disappearing have recovered nicely if left alone. In some cases, fish that were too rare to be caught have become commercially viable again when sections of ocean have been put off limits for a while. 

The animals know what to do, and what they mostly need from us is to be left alone. Give them back some living space, stop taking so much of their living space (i.e. stop creating so many more humans) and they will manage themselves and their populations as they did for millions of years, without even thinking about it.

In other words, we don't need wildlife management. We need people management.