The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering removing the wood stork from its status as a federally protected endangered species.
The bird has rebounded, marking 10,000 nesting pairs today, up from 5,000 just 40 years ago when the bird was first declared endangered, the agency announced Feb. 14.
Wood storks are long-legged, wading birds with a wingspan wider than a park bench. With a splotchy bald head and graceful wing beat, they have a striking appearance, like a blue heron crossed with a vulture.
After being restricted to a few swampy pockets in Florida, the species has become a regular in the Lowcountry, adapting to locales in their expanded range that have different kinds of wetlands: salt marshes, flooded rice fields, and even human-created wetlands. The birds have even adapted to increasingly unpredictable weather.
Wood storks can now be found in the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. Nesting colonies here are resilient. The service said the number of colonies have tripled in size, from 29 to 99, growing at rates that surpass the recovery goals that government scientists set for the species years ago. For these reasons, conservationists applauded the so-called “delisting.”
“The (Endangered Species) Act saved the wood stork, and it helped preserve and rebuild vital habitats throughout the Southeast,” said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that holds governments accountable for implementing the act. The center stressed the importance of a rigorous ongoing monitoring program, as the law requires, to “make sure ongoing threats don’t undo this hard-fought success.”
More than 1,600 species native to the U.S. are “listed” as endangered or threatened. Only 54 have been fully delisted due to recovery. Another 56 have been “downlisted” from endangered status to threatened status, which carries fewer protections. But changing an animal’s status is not always a celebratory affair.
The wood stork, the red-cockaded woodpecker and the Bachman’s warbler are all South Carolina birds that were, at one time, firmly on the endangered species list. Their distinct paths toward getting off the list embody the good, the bad and the political nature of conservation under the Endangered Species Act.
Consider the Bachman’s warbler. In September, the songbird was delisted after the federal government officially declared it extinct.
The bird was first discovered in 1830 by Charleston naturalist John Bachman and was once considered the rarest songbird in North America. As The Post and Courier reported, it was last spotted in South Carolina in 1948 by a Charleston doctor. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the species succumbed to habitat destruction and collection. But scientists don’t know for sure. Unlike the wood stork, little is known about how the Bachman’s warbler mated, nested and responded to threats.
In contrast, scientists know a lot about the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, including the increasing threat posed by climate change.
In 2021, a coalition of 27 environmental groups spoke out in opposition to a proposed downlisting of the bird’s status from endangered to threatened. Audubon South Carolina was among them. The groups claimed that the species has not met the government’s own pre-determined recovery targets, as is required under U.S. law before any downgrading process can begin.
Documents retrieved by the Southern Environmental Law Center under a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that, during the Trump administration, the service had internally planned to completely remove the species from the list for reasons that were “arbitrary” or not overtly science-based. The reasoning goes that the scaled-back downlisting proposal, which the Biden administration is now pursuing, remains tainted by arbitrary conclusions. The law requires that science, not politics, lead.
The red-cockaded woodpecker’s journey away from its endangered status remains controversial. After continued delays, no decision has been made. Red-cockaded woodpeckers in the Lowcountry are in a losing battle against developers that are trying to leverage weaknesses within the Endangered Species Act to destroy woodpecker nests and displace bird families. At least in South Carolina, delisting the red-cockaded woodpecker any time soon could be a blow to bird conservation.
As for the wood stork, the federal government will take comments on the proposed delisting through April 17 from other government agencies, scientists, environmental groups and citizens. No coalition of groups stand in opposition. It may be safe to say that, like the delisting of the American bald eagle in 2007, this move for wood storks is a win for conservation.
Follow Clare Fieseler on Twitter @clarefieseler.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
