When I was a kid the reading that most absorbed me was the “Drama in Real Life” article that appeared every month in Reader’s Digest. Campers attacked by grizzly bears, cars plunging off bridges, grotesque tractor accidents–every month a new heart-pounding adventure, a few minutes’ worth of you-are-there adrenaline jolts.
When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, few doubted that its intent was noble. Human activities were imperiling the continued existence of many animal and plant species, and a law to protect them seemed a good idea. But by 1978 the law’s protection of an obscure fish, the snail darter, was holding up completion of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam. The dam was built, and the fish survived, but the controversy’s legacy can be seen in ongoing disputes in various parts of the country. In the Pacific Northwest the attempt to protect the northern spotted owl has led to violence in the woods. In Arizona a bitter battle continues because an astronomical observatory threatens the only habitat of a squirrel subspecies. Examples could be listed for every region of the country.
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The Endangered Species Technical Bulletin doesn’t takes sides in this battle. As an organ of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with administering the act, it sticks with the biological facts. But it isn’t difficult to read between the lines and see what pressures the agency is facing.
In 1973 probably only a handful of biologists recognized how many species the law might cover. The animals that got the law passed were the big, showy species even a politician could love–the bald eagle, the American alligator, the gray whale. Conservation biologists call such creatures “charismatic megafauna.” Most of the money spent for endangered-species protection still goes to those animals, as shown in a recent bulletin article.
The trouble with the willow flycatcher–and the reason a controversy is likely to ensue if it’s listed as endangered–is that there are three other subspecies of the willow flycatcher. They nest farther to the north and are all relatively common. And they’re indistinguishable from the southwestern subspecies, except to a professional ornithologist versed in such arcana as the length of wing feathers. Not only that, but willow flycatchers are extremely difficult to distinguish from several other species of flycatcher.
It was the critical-habitat provision that nearly stopped the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. Some federal biologists say the provision comes near to the ecosystem protection championed by environmentalists, since there’s no way to save a wild animal without protecting its habitat. Save the habitat of one species, and you help out all the other animals and plants that live there too.
It’s very difficult to decide that a given population may be expendable. There are no rules governing which adaptations of which subspecies may prove valuable in the future. And few biologists are presumptuous enough to declare that the unique genetic makeup of some subspecies is unimportant, though politicians are quick to do so. The annals of agriculture are rife with examples of obscure wild crop plants whose genetic material was implanted in domestic varieties to make them stronger or more resistant to disease. Genes from a variety of land mammals have been used to breed stronger stocks of fish. As we enter the age of genetic engineering, there’s simply no way to predict whether given genes–including those of drab, obscure birds–will be important.
