Entry bubble Bye Bye, Blue Pike

By: Stephanie | September 10, 2009 | Category: General

Today Jane Goodall, famously known as the woman who lived with chimpanzees in Tanzania and noted conservationist, is lecturing at the Library of Congress on endangered species. Conservation efforts like Goodall’s were on my mind last weekend as I walked past endangered Galapagos Tortoises and Madagascar lemurs at a zoo. Seeing those animals made me curious about endangered species in the United States.

dead fishI learned that the U.S. currently has 1,320 endangered or threatened animal and plant species. An endangered species is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range, and a threatened species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the current rate of extinction is much higher now than in the past, mainly due to habitat loss. Other reasons are disease, pollution, the introduction of harmful nonnative species, and over-exploitation of wildlife for commercial purposes.

You can search for a specific species of plant or animal to find its status, or see the status of some of the more popular species.

A number of species have been removed from the endangered or threatened list. It’s chilling to me to see the species that are no longer on the list because they’re now extinct: the blue pike, the Santa Barbara song sparrow, and the Mariana mallard, to name a few.

Still, other species are no longer on the list because they’ve been saved by conservation efforts. The gray wolf, the Yellowstone grizzly bear, and, as GovGabber Jake noted, the bald eagle, are some of the success stories.

Learn more about endangered and threatened species from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And consider buying Federal Duck Stamps, where 98 cents of every dollar go directly to buying or leasing wetland habitat for protection in the National Wildlife Refuge System.

What do you think about wildlife and plant conservation?

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Entry bubble Bald Eagle Status

By: Jake | July 14, 2008 | Category: Travel

Thanks to Jim for posting last week while I was on vacation. I spent some time exploring the Pacific Northwest and from the comfort of my hotel balcony I witnessed our national bird in action. Bald Eagle on a Pole

One morning I noticed a blackbird attacking a bird sitting on an old dock post. I thought it was a heron, and my girlfriend suggested since the bird was shorter and had a beak and legs smaller than a heron, it might be a bald eagle. She was right, as you can tell from our photographic evidence.

It didn't really cross my mind that we were looking at a bald eagle at the time because when I was a kid the only place I had seen a bald eagle was the zoo. The Pacific Northwest has a large population of bald eagles, but they are making a huge comeback in the rest of the U.S. I know there is a pair of bald eagles nesting here in Alexandria, and my brother tells me he spots them on occasionally when he's driving in Eastern Virginia.

It's hard to believe that in 1782, when the United States adopted the bald eagle as a national symbol, there were as many as 100,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the nation. In 1967 that number was down to 417 due to shooting, habitat infringement and the use of DDT pesticide. This is why that same year the Department of Interior began to protect all bald eagles south of the 40th parallel under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966.

Eagle on the sandBy 2006 there were approximately 10,000 nesting bald eagle pairs and the Department of Interior took the birds off the federal list of threatened and endangered species in July 2007 with a promise to monitor the status of the species. Of course we are not back to the 100,000 pairs yet and the recovery process is delicate. By March 2008 DOI had returned bald eagles in the Sonoran Desert of central Arizona to the federal list of threatened species and the birds also grace a number of state-level threatened and endangered species lists. Still I'm happy to know that you don't have to go to the zoo to see a bald eagle anymore.

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