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Conservation
Lectures 29-
29 March - ??

Conservation

  Background and theory

 Avian Perspective -

 how many bird species extant?

 how many thought to have existed

 calculate extinction rate 90,000/130,000,000 yrs = .00069

 why bother worrying about a few more?

  Conservation biology -

 Class-define biodiversity

 species level 30-100 x 106 species - can cons. bio. be species based?

 population level -

 sources

 sinks

 metapopulations

 system level

 species interactions

 fragmentation

  roots of Conservation Biology

 Romantic-transendental Conservation Ethic of preservation

 Throreau, Emerson, Muir 1800s

 Resource Conservation Ethic - Gifford Pinchot

 1900 - US Forest Service

 Evolutionary-Ecological Land Ethic

 1930s - Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is considered the father of wildlife ecology and a true Wisconsin hero. He was a renowned scientist and scholar, exceptional teacher, philosopher, and gifted writer.
It is for his book, A Sand County Almanac, that Leopold is best known by millions of people around the globe. The Almanac,
often acclaimed as the century's literary landmark in conservation, melds exceptional poetic prose with keen observations of the natural world. The Almanac reflects an evolution of a lifetime of love, observation, and thought. It led to a philosophy that has guided many to discovering what it means to live in harmony with the land and with one another.

The roots of Leopold's concept of a "land ethic" can be traced to his birthplace on the bluffs of the Mississippi River near Burlington, Iowa. As a youngster, he developed a zealous appreciation and interest in the natural world, spending countless hours on adventures in the woods, prairies, and river backwaters of a then relatively wild Iowa. This early attachment to the natural world, coupled with an uncommon skill for both observation and writing, lead him to pursue a degree in forestry at Yale.

After Yale, Leopold joined the U.S. Forest Service and was assigned to the Arizona Territories. During his tenure, he began to see the land as a living organism and develop the concept of community. This concept became the foundation upon which he became conservation's most influential advocate. In 1924, he accepted a transfer to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison where he served as associate director, and began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1928.

Often credited as the founding father of wildlife ecology, Leopold's cornerstone book Game Management (1933) defined the fundamental skills and techniques for managing and restoring wildlife populations. This landmark work created a new science that intertwined forestry, agriculture, biology, zoology, ecology, education and communication. Soon after its publication, the University of Wisconsin created a new department, the Department of Game Management, and appointed Leopold as its first chair.

Leopold's unique gift for communicating scientific concepts was only equal to his fervor for putting theories into practice. In 1935, the Leopold family purchased a worn-out farm near Baraboo, in an area known as the sand counties. It is here Leopold put into action his beliefs that the same tools people used to disrupt the landscape could also be used to rebuild it. An old chicken coop, fondly known as the Shack, served as a haven and land laboratory for the Leopold family, friends, and graduate students. And it was here Leopold visualized many of the essays of what was to become his most influential work, A Sand County Almanac.

The Land Ethic
"The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
"The Land Ethic" from A Sand County Almanac

Passenger Pigeon, extinct
We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.

Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know. ...

The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightening that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air.
"Wisconsin" in A Sand County Almanac

Food and Fuel
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside.
"February" in A Sand County Almanac

Conservation Biology is: 

  crisis discipline

  manage endangered species

  define critical population sizes

  define habitat requirements

  manage corridors?

  wrestle with economics -

 how much does it cost to save a species?

 can species or habitat be accurately priced?

  What make species vulnerable?

  large size =

 low population size

 slow reproductive rate

  top order predators - accumulate toxins

  restricted range =

 low numbers

 susceptible

 habitat destruction

 disease/predation

 natural

 introduced

 hunting/trapping

  physical attributes

  good looks -

  Snowy Egrets

  parrots in general, etc.

 good taste

 flightlessness

  low numbers alone doesn’t guarantee threatened status

  Passenger Pigeon numbered 2 billion

  Eskimo Curlew

  since 1600 = 92 extinctions

 91% partly due to introduced spp

 32% partly due to habitat change (Bachman’s Warbler in 1960s)

 25% partly due to human hunting

  Modern threats

  habitat loss

 scrubland

 urban sprawl

 grazing

 rainforest

 14->7% land area

  >>50% of species

 coffee plantations - Neotropical Migrants.

 

Shade-Grown Coffee

•Migratory birds and many resident birds find sanctuary in the forest canopy of traditional coffee plantations.

•Shade trees protect the plants from rain and sun, help maintain soil quality, and aid in natural pest control, thanks to the birds.

•Traditional coffee plantations help to conserve watersheds, leading to higher water quality and quantity for local populations.

•Shade-grown coffee is cultivated in specific ways that help protect biodiversity.

•Shade coffee plants can produce crops of beans for up to 50 years.

         

Sun-Grown Coffee

•90% fewer bird species are found in sun-grown coffee areas compared with shade-grown coffee areas.

•Requires chemical fertilizers and pesticides and year-round labor, placing financial demands on the growers.

•Leads to greater soil erosion and higher amounts of toxic runoff endangering both wildlife and people.

•Sun coffee plants produce crops of beans for only 10 to 15 years.

 More threats to modern birds

 non-rainforest

 US wiped out all eastern forests

 90% of Pacific Northwest

 Northern Spotted Owl

 also Marbled Murrelet

                                                                        nest only discovered 1988

 wetlands

 development

 affects

 breeding of waterfowl

 migratory stopovers

 other species -

 ecosystem function

 Habitat fragmentation

 restricts available habitat

 edge effects

 Direct mortality

  270*106 out of estimated 20*109 in continental US

 cats - 1,000,000,000 birds/yr!

 underestimate

 feral cats

 cat-scratch fever

 hunters (120,000,000)

 market hunters

 cannons

 1863 on Nantucket - killed birds till they                    ran out of ammo

  Plume hunters

 5x106 birds/yr for fashion

 Chapman counted 700 hats,

 542 had birds parts

 20 species

                                                            T. Gilbert Pearson – NC and the start of Audubon

 windows, towers

 roadkills

 other

  Pesticides & “xenobiotics”

 usually affect fecundity

 xenobiotics affects during embryonic development, effects show up later in life 

  Live bird trade

 2-5 x 106 birds taken from wild/year

 >50% African finches

 but 77 families

 2x106 legally imported into US, many others smuggled

 Parrots -

 Spix’ (Little Blue) Macaw

 now two in wild, 40 in captivity

 $10-50K/bird

  birds of prey

 Gyrs, etc. -

 story overblown

 captive breeding

   Extinct (?), Endangered, and Threatened Species

  California Condor (more below)

  Ivory-billed Woodpecker ?

  Eskimo Curlew ?

 

Extinctions of Birds of the Eastern US –

160 nested, 4 have gone extinct (or is it 3?) since European settlement:

Carolina Parakeet

Once numerous throughout forests, serious agricultural pest.

Shot by farmers, gregarious nature made it extremely vulnerable

1831 Audubon commented on declining numbers

Frank Chapman recorded the last wild flock in Lake Okachobee FL in 1904

Captive flock survived until 1918

Passenger pigeon

Once the most abundant bird on earth, with flocks that darkened the midday sky…

Gone by the turn of the 20th cent.

Why?

Hunting and deforestation – curiously, it was really the railroad and telegraph that drove the final nails in the coffin

Key is understanding the ecology

Mast fruiting of oak, beech, hickory forests to swamp predators

Passenger pigeons responded by becoming nomads

Formed huge nesting colonies in the spring where there was an abundance of fruit from previous year

Effectively used same strategy as trees—overwhelm nest predators--One colony in Wisconsin 136,000,000 birds over 750 square miles

This was good protection against hawks, foxes, coons, but not against humans

From one colony in MI 100,000 lbs of pigeon meat shipped to market

By late 1600s people noted declines

Last major nesting in New England was in MA in 1851

By 1860s big flocks gone from NY and PA

Fecundity low (1/pair/yr) and most nested in a few colonies.

By late 1800s last strongholds were the great lakes region.

By 1878 estimates of 50,000,000

By 1890 only scattered individuals could be found

Railroad permitted market hunters access to even most distant colonies and ship meat back to markets and telegraph spread the word when a new colony established itself.

Last wild pigeon killed in Pike Co., Ohio in 1900. Martha, the last individual of the species died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914

How did they go so fast?

Hunters disturbed every breeding colony for several pigeon generations so entire cohorts died off without replacing themselves.

Few stragglers nesting in small groups didn’t have the benefit of large numbers and fell prey to natural predators.

Ivory-billed woodpecker

Specialist on beetle grubs excavated from recently deceased trees in old-growth bottomland forests of the southeast.

Densities low—1 pr/6.25 miles

Disappeared below radar screens in US in last 40 yrs, but credible sighting this year (2000)?

Still persisting in Cuba, perhaps, but critically threatened there as well.

Clearly a case of low-density habitat specialist succumbing to habitat loss

Bachman’s Warbler

A curious extinction

Another bottomland specialist of the SE

Wintered exclusively in Cuba

Described by Audubon in 1833, not seen again for 50 yrs (except a sighting in Cuba). Then a flurry of sightings, but by the 30s it was already declining.

Last sightings in 60s –

Terborgh thinks it had a very sparse population, limited by wintering grounds (Cuba) which spread out over a vast area. Population size got so low that birds couldn’t find mates.

Kirtland’s Warbler - Jackpines in Mich. and Bahamas

 Golden-cheeked Warbler - Edwards Plateau of central TX

 Austin residents approved large bond to purchase critical habitat

  Bachman’s Warbler -

 rarest warbler

 last sightings in SC

 breeds in canebreaks & wet woodlands

 winters in Cuba and Isle of Pines.

  Red-cockaded WP

  Neotropical Migrants

  Puzzling trends

  Migrants decline while non-migrants don’t

  fragment size matters

  data difficult to interpret

  Where could problem lie?

  breeding territories

  wintering grounds

  stopovers

           

  Progress - Case studies

 

 what do we need for conservation to happen

 an ethic/public awareness

 democracy or an environmentally benign dictatorship

  laws

 incentives

 penalties

  knowledge

 inventories

 natural history

 captive breeding & reintroduction

 legislation -

1708/1710 closed seasons/no camouflaged or sailboats for hunting ducks

 1800s misc. restrictions on hunting

 1886 AOU model law for states

 1916 1st international convention - protects                                          migratory birds

  1934  Duck stamps

  1973 ESA

  1985 West Hem. Res. Syst. Network

  1989 CITES

  successfull programs

  California Condor?

 1987 last Gymnogyps californianus taken out of                                                            wild - joined 26 already in captivity

  now >100

 release sites?

  Whooping Cranes  http://whoopers.usgs.gov/

 18 in 1939

  now over 140

  captive populations built with “insurance eggs” of wild birds

  problems

 disease

 cross fostering with Sandhill Cranes not                                                                        very successfull

  Peregrine Falcons

 great success

 expensive

 hard to pull the plug

  Aplomado Falcons - limit of range

  The beautiful Aplomado Falcon was once a regular member of the coastal and interior grasslands of the American southwest. The best information describing the historical distribution and relative abundance of this species has been garnered from museum collections and from the notes of professional egg collectors. These records indicate that the Aplomado Falcon was fairly common throughout south Texas, west Texas, southern New Mexico, and southern Arizona at the beginning of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, the number of Aplomado Falcon egg sets collected in south Texas between 1890 and 1915 outnumbered those of both the White-tailed Hawk and the Crested Caracara, species which remain common today. Unlike the White-tailed Hawk and the Crested Caracara, the Aplomado Falcon declined rapidly over the next few decades with the last nest recorded near Deming, New Mexico, in 1952. Perhaps the most plausible explanation for the Aplomado Falcon’s decline was the combined effects of large-scale habitat change and human persecution. In addition, the wide-spread use of persistent pesticides probably eliminated the few Aplomado Falcons that remained, and effectively prevented any possibility for re-colonization from southern populations.  

In 1977 The Peregrine Fund decided to develop a captive breeding and reintroduction program for the Aplomado Falcon because suitable habitat appeared still to exist and because their habitat requirements were consistent with certain forms of current land use, notably cattle ranching. Twenty-five nestlings were collected over a period of several years from populations in Mexico, from which a total of 578 captive-bred falcons have been released into the wild. The Aplomado Falcon recovery effort received its first hint of success when a pair of adult falcons, bred and released by The Peregrine Fund, successfully fledged young in Cameron County, Texas, in 1995. This first successful nest heralded the return of a species that had been absent from the United States for some 43 years.

 

Mauritius Kestrel

             behavioral manipulation (as w/ Peregrines.

The Mauritius Kestrel only exists in the wild on the island of Mauritius, the former home of the extinct Dodo Bird. As a result of habitat loss and pesticide contamination this small falcon was reduced to only four known wild birds in 1974.

Mauritius Kestrel chicks.

Through captive breeding and release, and management of wild pairs, the population increased to about 100 pairs in 1996 with an estimate of 400 kestrels in the overall population. With the help of the Mauritian Wildlife Appeal Fund, The Peregrine Fund, Ruth Andres, and other cooperators a fantastic recovery has occurred.

 

 

  Hawk Mountain -

 Rosalie Edge / Maurice Broun

 logged 1,000,000th raptor in 1992

 public education

 Amateurs—How can you help?

 xmas counts

 Breeding Bird Surveys

 Cornell’s Project Feederwatch, and many other “citizen science” projects

Support conservation groups with your time and money.  

 

Conservation Review

Vocabulary:

Biodiversity
Population source/sink
Metapopulation
Habitat fragmentation
Species-area relationship
Island biogeography
Landscape ecology
Xenobiotics
Biomagnification
Endangered species
Mast fruiting
Bottomland forest
Neotropical migrants
Safe Harbor Programs 

Questions:

Who were: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold

What characteristics make a species vulnerable to extinction?

Are there exceptions? Cite examples.

How many extinctions of bird species have been recorded since 1600?

What factors have been identified most often with these extinctions?

Why should you drink shade-grown coffee?

Where do Marbled Murrelets nest? (What family are they in?)

What biotic and abiotic changes accompany habitat fragmentation?

List 5 sources of direct mortality that threaten bird populations.

How can these affects be lessened?

If so much forest has been cleared in the eastern US, why have only 4 of 160 species gone extinct?

How did the telegraph and railroad contribute to the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon?

What are the key elements of managing habitat for Red-cockaded Woodpeckers?

What species have responded successfully (or apparently successfully) to conservation efforts? What have been the keys to success in each case?

What species have proven problematical?

What have the problems been with these species?

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