Least tern offers fish to newly hatched chick by Dan Pancamo

The wheel of the seasons is turning again.  For a few glorious weeks earlier this month, our shorelines around the bay were packed with water birds.  Shorebirds in their breeding finery shared the bounty of the intertidal and shallow water areas with California least tern newly arrived from Mexico.  The shorebirds are now gone, away in the night with a high keening cry, for their nesting grounds in the far north.

Victorian woman with egret feathers on hat, 1878 by Eastbourne

The least tern, smallest of our three tern species, will be with us for the summer.  They arrive along California’s shore with their tuxedo colors and distinctive white “V” on their forehead in late April.  Once on the brink of extinction, their population has been steadily increasing from a low of 600 birds in 1973 to current estimates of over 7,000 birds.  Long before this, in the late 1800s, they suffered depletion for the millinery trade.  What fashionable Victorian woman could be seen without hats decorated with bird feathers, wings and even whole birds?

The Migratory Bird Treaty was passed in 1918 affording protection from hunting.  Another pressure on the California least tern’s success, however, is its reliance on open, sandy beaches for nesting habitat.  Throughout much of California, this is also where people like to spend their summers.  And with the introduction of non-native predators — cats, dogs, and red foxes — the ground-nesting birds have had a hard time raising their young.

Banding young California least terns helps track their success. Photo by Linda Tanner

There remains a success story in the terns return and of the people who care enough to fight for their future.  California least tern are on the verge of being delisted and downgraded from endangered to threatened, one of 110 success stories celebrated on Endangered Species Day last week.  The main remaining hurdle to delisting them is continued commitment by agencies to protect their all-important nesting habitat along our shores.

Tern-protection volunteers also work with the East Bay Regional Park District and have successfully helped establish a new breeding colony in Hayward.  You can learn more about the terns at Alameda Point in this article and video. You can also view the Alameda nesting colony on Saturday, June 16 on one of three bus tours departing from Crab Cove Visitor Center; reserve a space by calling (888) 327-2757 or online at www.ebparksonline.org.  There will also be programs throughout the day for all ages highlighting terns and a tern watch along the beach at 2:30pm.

And are you curious about what a California least tern sounds like? Listen to an audio recording here.

Recent discoveries of a Lilliputian lizard and elfin amphibian, fascinating in their own right, highlight one of the most enduring questions in biology: what controls the evolution of body size? Why do some taxa grow smaller and smaller, while others grow larger and larger, as if they’d tumbled down the rabbit hole with Alice and devoured all the curious potions and cakes she found there?

The question endures in large part because body size affects nearly every aspect of an organism’s existence, from physiology (temperature regulation and metabolism) to ecology (life history and foraging strategies) and evolution (reproductive success over time).

For more than a century, biologists thought evolutionary taxa, or lineages, grew larger and larger over time, a phenomenon known as Cope’s Rule, illustrated most often by horse evolution. Modern equids, scientists believe, evolved from the diminutive Hyracotherium (commonly known as eohippus, or “dawn horse”), which appeared in the fossil record some 55 million years ago. Many textbooks mistakenly liken Hydracotherium to a fox terrier (think Asta of The Thin Man movies), but the ancestral horse was more Lassie than Asta, as Stephen Jay Gould famously explained in his essay "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone."

A replica skeleton of Hydracotherium vasacciensis, the putative ancestral horse, at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jeff Kubina)

In 1997, though, David Jablonski showed that (as usual) biology rarely follows hard and fast rules. In a 10-year review of fossils covering 16 million years and 1,000 species from 191 lineages of bivalves (clams and scallops) and gastropods (snails and slugs), Jablonski found that just as many taxa decreased in body size over time as increased. And even the horse example has come under fire. A 2004 study analyzed horse fossils in light of recently resolved relationships among evolutionary groups and showed that while the lineage that gave rise to the modern horse grew larger, others shrank.

Still, examples of lineages evolving toward larger body size abound, with evidence linking greater size to higher fitness (better survival and mating success for individuals). If you’re big (say, a lion or other large carnivore), it’s easier to catch prey, avoid predation (though elephants, like mammoths before them, may perish at the hands of human hunters), survive tough conditions, attract mates (silverback gorillas claim exclusive breeding rights to females), and claim more resources than your competitors.

Given the advantages of size, one might think the tiny frog and chameleon are simply freaks, outliers among a field of giants. But the fossil record offers plenty of examples of large animals shrinking over millennia (known as “phyletic dwarfism”), often after winding up on islands or other restricted ranges.

Until about 10,000 years ago, dwarf elephants inhabited Crete and other Mediterranean islands, which favored smaller, nimbler forms that could survive on less food and manage the rocky terrain. Even dwarf mammoths (the oxymoron notwithstanding), dinosaurs, and hominids (Homo floresiensis) once inhabited isolated islands.

If you’re small, you might reproduce quickly, offer too little reward for a predator’s effort, and maybe even prove too hard to see.

Paedophryne amauensis, a minute frog found in Papua New Guinea, may be the smallest vertebrate on Earth. (Photo: PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029797)

That seems to be the case for a pint-sized amphibian found, through no small effort, in the forests of Papua New Guinea, which its discoverers claimed as the “world’s smallest vertebrate.” Because the largest vertebrate, the blue whale, and (previously) smallest, a fish, are aquatic species, some biologists thought a water-based lifestyle may facilitate the evolution of extreme size. But, as the scientists argue in the paper describing the frog, this doesn’t explain how extreme miniaturization evolved at least 11 times in terrestrial frogs.

The 7-8 millimeter frog, named Paedophryne amauensis, is active mostly at dawn and dusk, sounding more like a cricket than a frog when it calls out to potential mates from the leafy detritus of the forest floor. (The authors dubbed the species “amauensis” after the region near Amau Village where it was found.) Leaf litter in tropical forests stays moist throughout the year, keeping the minute amphibian safe from desiccation and likely explaining the evolution of its life history: offspring bypass the tadpole stage, emerging fully formed, though even tinier, avoiding fish, insects, and other aquatic predators. Of course, teeny adults would be at higher risk from predators if they lived in the water, too, which might explain why the species carved out a niche in upland areas with a lower diversity of such threats.

Brookesia micra, one of four dwarf leaf chameleon species found in Madagascar. (Photo: PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031314)

And just last month, another group of researchers reported their discovery of four new species of dwarf chameleons, one so small it can balance on the tip of a match head. The mini chameleon, Brookesia micra, measures a smidgen over an inch from snout to tail, and seems restricted to Nosy Hara, a small (naturally) island off the coast of Madagascar. An extensive survey of Nosy Hara and adjacent islands in 2007 failed to spot the little lizard, which scampers around limestone rocks and dry forest leaf litter during the day and roosts on low-lying branches a few inches above the ground at night.

Unlike their amphibian counterparts, the minuscule reptiles inhabit relatively dry tropical areas. Because small body size carries a higher risk of desiccation from the proportionally higher body surface area, it’s surprising the lizards live in a dry environment, the scientists explain in their report. It’s possible they’ve adapted to certain features of the landscape that retain moisture, like leaf-filled fissures in limestone.

The tiny frog and chameleons may or may not win the title for smallest of their kind, but the distinction is beside the point. The discovery of these new species offers a rare ray of hope amid ongoing reports of devastating declines in amphibian and reptile populations around the world, mostly due to habitat destruction. These dwarf species have likely benefited from minimal space and resource requirements, and being too tiny to spot. And for me, it’s no small comfort to know that we can still find wonders, both beautiful and strange, on this side of the looking glass.

A wolf from OR7's pack in Oregon. (Image: Oregon Department of Fish and Game)

OR7, the lone gray wolf from a pack in Oregon, crossed back into his home state yesterday after two months of wandering in Northern California. OR7’s trek made him the first wolf in California in almost 90 years. Officials say it’s possible the wolf will continue to use both states.

With OR7’s arrival, California has been thrown into a national debate about how to manage wolves. Environmentalists want to see a wolf population restored in the state. For others, OR7 is not a welcome visitor. In Lassen County, where OR7 has spent the bulk of his time, wolf opposition is heating up.

"If it's killing my cattle, I'm gonna kill it."

At a recent county board of supervisors meeting in Susanville, a town in the state’s rural northeast corner, Fish and Game biologist Karen Kovacs takes the podium. “What we’re here today to do is just to share what we know about wolves in California,” she says to the crowd.

Kovacs’ agency gets daily downloads about the two-year-old male wolf’s location through its radio collar. “Are there other wolves in California? That’s a $64 million dollar question,” she says.

If there's one thing Kovacs has learned since OR7 arrived, it’s that wolves make people emotional. For several weeks, Kovacs and other wildlife officials have attended a number of public meetings about California’s wolf. In the state’s northern counties, the reaction has been vocal.

“The protection afforded something that doesn’t belong here in the first place doesn’t make any sense,” says Susanville resident Len Grizwold. “Be cautious, folks. They’re here to tell you there’s nothing to worry about,” says another resident. The reception from county supervisor and rancher Bob Pyle isn’t any warmer.

“I really don’t care what it is. If it’s killing my cattle, I’m gonna kill it," he says.

“Any wolf in California is considered endangered,” responds Susan Moore of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “And if you should take it, kill it, it is a $100,000 fine or a year in jail, or both.”

That sentiment has followed wolves from the moment they were reintroduced in the West almost 20 years ago. In states like Idaho and Montana, where wolf populations have rebounded, there’s been an all-out war. Ranchers and hunters say wolves kill too many livestock and elk. Environmentalists see the wolf as a key part of a healthy ecosystem.

With OR7’s arrival, that debate has come to California.

On the Wolf’s Trail

In a quiet pine forest outside of Susanville, Kovacs and Fish and Game biologist Richard Callas walk through a light layer of snow. OR7 crossed a major highway nearby a few weeks ago, not far from where California’s last wolf was trapped and killed in 1924.

Click to see a larger map of where OR7 has traveled.

“The way we find his tracks is because they’re pretty darn big,” says Kovacs.

OR7’s exact location is secret to protect the wolf, but once he leaves an area, Kovacs and Callas go in to see what he’s been eating. “We know that OR7 has fed on two deer. We don’t know if he killed them or scavenged them,” Callas says.

Life isn’t easy for a wolf on his own. But there’s a reason OR7 has traveled 2,000 miles since he left his pack in Oregon last September. “His love life hasn’t been much to brag about lately,” Callas says. “But he’s certainly looking for a mate.”

In other states, it’s taken about 10 years for a pack to be established after the first wolf showed up. But biologists aren’t sure how successful wolves will be here. “Our elk population is smaller than some state like Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. Our deer numbers were lower than they were,” he says.

Since Oregon’s wolf packs live hundreds of miles from the border, it could be some time before another wolf wanders this way. But for the Department of Fish and Game, that may not matter. Groups on both sides are calling for some kind of plan to manage wolves.

“There are entities out there who are ready to litigate at the drop of a hat,” says Kovacs. “Can we get those stakeholders here in California to the table to collectively meet to move forward?”

Local Ranchers Concerned

OR7 wandered close to Willow Creek Ranch outside of Susanville.

On a cold morning at Willow Creek Ranch outside of Susanville, Jack Hanson is getting ready to feed 300 hungry cattle. A few weeks ago, OR7 wasn’t far from here. “About 17 or 18 miles as the crow flies,” says Hanson.

Hanson says it’s not OR7 that’s he’s worried about. It’s that wolf populations could grow. In other states, some ranchers are trying out tools to deter wolves, like special fencing and loud noises. Some even get text messages when wolves are close.

Most ranchers see wolves as one more thing to deal with in an already tough industry, says Hanson. Still, he wants to be part of the discussion. “We’ll be able to have a dialogue with agencies. I don’t think it will ever come to exactly where we want it, which is not to have them back in the first place.”

State and Federal Protections

Wolves are currently protected in California under the federal Endangered Species Act, but several environmental groups are petitioning the state to protect them under California law as well. That would require the Department of Fish and Game to figure out how many wolves belong in California and how they’ll recover.

The federal government is also considering whether to specially protect California wolves. Populations in Idaho, Montana and parts of Oregon and Washington have already been taken off the endangered species list but this week, the agency recommended removing protection for wolves in some of the remaining parts of the lower 48 states.

California wolves may still be protected, however. Fish and Wildlife is considering whether to specially protect wolves in parts of Oregon, Washington and California. If so, the agency would consider writing a recovery plan for what would be known as the Pacific Northwest population. That decision is due by September 30th.

“We don’t see California as being essential to the recovery of wolves. It’s not prime wolf habitat,” says Dan Ashe, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “But certainly, wolves will move hopefully in the future and will find some hospitable territory in California. Some may establish themselves there, but hopefully they’ll be well-managed under state law.”

Weathering the Debate

The question is: can California avoid the battles that other states have seen?

“No, I don’t think so,” says Ed Bangs, the recently retired Wolf Recovery Coordinator at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He’s been in the middle of the Western wolf debate for two decades.

“You have to remember wolves and wolf management has nothing to do with reality. I mean we can give you facts, you know all this biology stuff. That isn’t what people talk about. They’re talking about what wolves mean to them symbolically.”

But he thinks that debate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Imagine if it was the way it was before when no one cared at all about natural resources or wildlife. Apathy is a lot worse.”

Just 30 years ago, there were only a handful of gray wolves in the West. Today, there are more than 1,600.

On a dreary late January morning, I join a small group of guardedly optimistic souls to scan the creeks of West Marin’s San Geronimo Valley to glimpse one of the Bay Area’s rarest denizens, the critically endangered coho salmon. With luck, we’d see a few survivors of the batch born here three years ago, returning to their home stream to pass on their genes to the next generation and renew the salmonid cycle of life.

It’s a cycle that’s in imminent danger. We know the chances of witnessing a coho homecoming in Lagunitas Creek are slim, especially considering the provenance of this run. The fish, officially called the 2008-2009 cohort, emerged from a total of 26 redds (the spawning beds of salmonids). A shockingly low number. The lowest on record.

Coho lay between 1,400 and 3,000 eggs (depending on the female’s size), and it’s a good thing, because the salmon lifestyle is fraught with peril. Adults bury eggs in gravel under rocks, but silt from homes built too close to streams can choke the flow of oxygenated water and suffocate eggs. Surviving eggs yield tiny “alevins” that subsist on yolk sacs, hidden among rocks to avoid predatory insects, until they venture into the current as fry. If fry evade kingfishers, herons, and otters, they grow through summer, fall, and winter, barely the size of a ballpoint pen. Finally, as saltwater-ready smolts, they travel downstream to the Tomales Bay estuary, where bigger fish, birds, and hungry sea lions await, then head out to sea.

Coho can swim thousands of miles in the ocean, feeding on smaller fish or falling prey to sharks, sea lions, seals, orcas, and fishing boats. It’s a wonder any have come back at all.

But they have. And it’s what they come home to, what we do for them in their natal streams, that’s critical to the species’ survival, says our guide, Jonathan Appelbaum, conservation coordinator and restoration scientist with the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN). To illustrate his point, he takes us to the Leo Cronin Viewing Area, “where all the action is right now.”

The steely overcast sky adds a nip to the damp air but makes it easier to spot the battered bodies of the silvery fish, barely moving in the dark waters of the stream, about 30 feet below the trail. They take a beating as they move from salt- to freshwater and carom off rocks, logs, and sundry debris on their way home.

“They look like zombie fish,” says volunteer naturalist Shannon Savage. “Their bodies are just falling apart. They’ve stopped eating and are just here to breed.”

A male (left) and two female coho, easier to spot thanks to their denuded tailfins, return to their natal stream in Lagunitas Creek to spawn. (Photo: Liza Gross)

As we survey the creek, we spot ghoulish white streaks undulating near the creek bed, possibly fungus on a depleted fish, but more likely a female’s tailfin, or what’s left of it. Females gyrate with so much force to make redds that they shred scales, skin, and fins, Appelbaum says, “until they’re just stubs.”

Binoculars confirm the blurry white flecks as a female, fighting the current to guard her eggs from predators and other females. With 50% of spawning habitat cut off by dams to sate human water needs, competition for nesting sites is fierce. My excitement turns to sorrow as it hits me: her mission complete, she will soon die.

The smell of home

The fish don’t start their improbable journey upstream until the first winter storms send plumes of freshwater, replete with the chemistry and scent of home, into Tomales Bay. The freshwater pulse leads coho by the nose back to their birthplace. But the arid winter, one of the driest on record, cut spawning season short. The vast majority of fish didn’t return until the end of January. We’re seeing the stragglers.

A week earlier, Appelbaum braved a hailstorm to scout fish at Roy’s Pools, a few miles down the road. “Sure enough,” he says, “I looked over and saw a fish jump.” Fish can now pass what used to be Roy’s Dam thanks to a chance encounter with a few frustrated fish.

SPAWN Executive Director Todd Steiner recalls driving his daughter to preschool when he noticed giant two-foot fish swimming in two inches of water, stuck in gaps of a broken concrete structure in the dam one December morning in 1997. He watched the determined fish jump up, slam into the dam, fall back, and repeat their ordeal over and over.

Steiner called an editor at CNN who’d asked him for help on a story about endangered species, and alerted the local media. Soon, hundreds of people turned up at Roy’s Dam to watch the hapless fish.

The community spent three years working with a small army of engineers to make the dam coho-friendly. There was just one problem. Even with the best engineers and knowledge at the time, Steiner says, “we solved an upstream migration problem for adults but created a downstream migration problem for juveniles.”

Juvenile survival is the coho’s biggest problem, mostly, thanks to us. We dam their streams for our reservoirs and channel placid waters into raging, fry-shredding flows. We convert floodplain habitat into housing, farms, and ranches. And, worried about floods, we clear fallen trees that give fry refuge from predators.

Until the population crashed in 2008, Steiner led emergency rescues, going into small tributaries to scoop up fry stranded in fragmented, evaporating pools and moving them downstream. Since the late '90s, Steiner and his group have relocated 23,000 juveniles. But in the past few years, fewer and fewer fish have spawned in these tributaries.

Even so, coho advocates are buoyed by this year’s census: 130 redds and 340 live fish (though the live census likely includes double counts).

Sea-fed forests

Just 60 years ago, hundreds of thousands of coho delivered nutrients and energy to our coastal, stream, and ocean ecosystems. Historic salmon runs probably even shaped inland ecology. Peter Moyle, professor of fisheries biology at the University of California at Davis, traced the flow of marine nutrients from chinook runs in the Central Valley’s Mokelumne River to adjacent vineyards.

“You see the number of vultures increase as the salmon come in, bear and deer and other animals come down to the streamside to feed and then distribute the nutrients into the uplands,” Moyle says. “Trees grow bigger and faster, and when trees are bigger, you have more habitat for birds.”

When you lose the big salmon runs, he adds, “you’ll reduce the population of a lot of things that depend on them.”

Living at the southernmost distribution of the species, our coho may prove an invaluable genetic resource in the face of global warming. They’ve somehow learned to adapt to warmer water temperatures, Steiner explains, and may hold a genetic key to understanding how other populations will cope with a warming world.

Fish feed the forest: A salmon carcass on the banks of Lagunitas Creek sustains local animals, birds, and even trees. When salmon spawn in high densities, they deliver substantial quantities of marine-derived nutrients to the soil, plants, and trees along stream banks. Biologists are studying how the loss of these nutrients may affect riparian ecosystems.
(Photo: Liza Gross)

Nearly 90% of coho habitat is on private land. For Steiner, the key to coho survival rests in the hands of Marin County’s Board of Supervisors. We need regulations to move houses back from streams, he says, and keep trees standing so they can capture desperately needed moisture during dry spells.

But we all play a part, starting with water conservation. Every drop we waste could offer a lifeline to a species struggling to survive.

As I retrace my steps along Lagunitas Creek five days later, the warm sun casts a glare on the rippling water, now opaque. I search for signs of the sacrificial offerings of the week before. Finally, I notice a carcass on the creek’s edge, pulled up by a raccoon or maybe an osprey. I close my eyes and imagine the forest floor flush with salmon detritus, rowdy with feasting scavengers, as it surely was before dams disfigured the watershed. When I open them, I hear only the sound of rushing water.

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I’ll write about SPAWN’s habitat restoration efforts, and how you can help, in a future post.

Dusky-capped flycatcher (credit: mdf)

Most people know the Philadelphia suburbs for cheesesteaks and unruly sports fans. But it’s no wonder that John James Audubon started his lifelong affair with birds just 25 miles northwest of Center City, and a 20-minute drive from my natal stomping grounds. The dense, rolling woodlands of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County where I grew up offered prime habitat for cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, wrens, and countless other species my mom loved to point out to us kids. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom’s avian affinities taught me not just to pay attention to the biology in my backyard but, ultimately, to consider which species lived there and why.

This weekend, novice Bay Area wildlife watchers get the chance to play field biologist in their own backyards and join forces with expert birders and scientists to gather data on the incidence, abundance, and distribution of birds. Between February 17 and 20, the 15th annual Great Backyard Bird Count invites people of all ages and experience to spend as little as 15 minutes (or as long as you like) counting birds wherever you are.

The event is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon, and Bird Studies Canada, leading bird conservation organizations that provide a wealth of resources for participants, including tips for getting started,
regional checklists, and tools for resolving tricky identifications.

“The Great Backyard Bird Count is an excellent introductory citizen science project for any level of birder,” says Brian Sullivan, an expert on North American birds and project leader of Cornell’s online resource for birders around the world, eBird.

“You can just count the birds you see in your backyard or go to your local park and count what you see there. The idea is to get a weekend snapshot of late-winter bird distribution across the United States and to make things really simple so just about anyone can participate.”

Sullivan, who has 1,669 species on his life list, says lucky birders could see “mega-rarities” like an Iceland gull, “a very rare bird in California” spotted near Sausalito in early February, or maybe the dusky-capped flycatcher that's been living in Golden Gate Park all winter.

The largest estuary on the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Delta provides habitat and refuge to more than 250 species of waterbirds, some (including pelicans, loons, herons, and egrets) year-round residents, others, like the Wilson’s phalarope and Sabine’s gull, on stopovers to feed and rest before resuming their long-distance migrations. As many as 800,000 birds inhabit Bay Area waterways at any given time.

To find out which birds you’re likely to see in your area, go to Cornell’s eBird, click on “View and Explore Data,” then click on “Bar Charts,” select “United States,” “California,” and then “Counties in California.” Choose your county, click “continue,” and you’ll see the occurrence of birds throughout the year.

Last year, participants entered more than 92,000 checklists with 1.4 million birds from 596 species. Their data helped researchers identify changes in abundance (including an increase in evening grosbeaks, which declined 50% between 1988 and 2006) and distribution (winter finches moving south), and spot anomalies (an Asian brown shrike in McKinley, California).

The bird counts give weekend nature lovers an easy way to help scientists gather data on a widely distributed group of animals that serve as valuable indicators of biodiversity. Because birds occupy many different “trophic” levels in food webs, eating everything from insects to fish to mammals (and, for top predators like owls, hawks, and eagles, other birds), they play critical roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems. Among their many “ecosystem services,” all of which benefit humans, birds help regulate prey populations, facilitate plant reproduction through pollination and seed dispersal, and recycle nutrients by scavenging carcasses.

This widespread influence on their environment also makes them extremely sensitive to ecosystem disruptions, including habitat destruction and climate change. An alarming 13% of the world’s birds, 1,253 species, face extinction, according to the 2011 IUCN Red List. The Great Indian bustard, a native of India and Pakistan that barks when alarmed, has been reclassified as critically endangered, a victim of hunting and widespread habitat destruction. Scientists think fewer than 250 mature birds remain.

Closer to home, black-crowned night herons and snowy egrets have been on a downward slide since 2005. And the endangered California clapper rail, once abundant in the tidal marshes of San Francisco Bay, offers a case study in the unintended consequences of development. Extensive filling and diking of the bay has destroyed some 85% of the clapper rail’s salt marsh habitat, making a shy species that seems to prefer scampering over swimming and flying easy pickings for feral cats and invasive red foxes, which now have unfettered access to adults and their ground-nesting offspring.

California clapper rail (Don Roberson)

Roughly 60% of the critically endangered clapper rail population, estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500, lives in San Francisco Bay’s Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, in Fremont.

Researchers will use the information collected from the bird count to learn how birds like the clapper rail are coping with these new predation pressures, as well as other stresses from ongoing urbanization, global climate change, and disease.

The decline of suitable habitat for these species affects us as well. Tidal marshes filter contaminants to enhance water quality and serve as natural flood barriers. If the marshes can no longer support species like the clapper rail, chances are they can’t provide these ecosystem services for us either.

Birds are among the most diverse and ubiquitous vertebrates on the planet and often offer humans a first brush with wildlife.

As a little girl, I marveled that my mom always knew when Jenny Wren and her husband, Joe (as she liked to call the resident house wrens), would appear in our backyard, build their nest, and settle into the business of raising, feeding, and protecting their broods.

She couldn’t have known that scientists would one day blame the precipitous declines in Bewick’s wrens in the eastern United States on the expansion of her beloved house wrens, known for ejecting eggs, and even young, from coveted nest sites.

Blue jay (Liza Gross)

As I listened to Mom’s fanciful tales of avian domestic dramas, my young imagination conjured all manner of worrisome scenarios. Would Joe find enough food for the babies? Could Jenny protect them from a torrential summer downpour? How would either of them cope with a curious cat? Some may shudder at such anthropomorphizing, but I wonder: If more people viewed birds the way my mom did, struggling to survive like the rest of us, would they worry about their welfare, too?

Henry David Thoreau first said “In wildness is the preservation of the world” in a lecture some months after Audubon’s death. I like to think, had they discussed the question, Audubon would have objected: “My dear sir, I believe you meant to say, ‘In birds is the preservation of the world.’ ”

 Cool Critters Lake Erie Water Snake Educator Guide

Within and along the waters of Lake Erie (one of the five Great Lakes), there is a daily struggle for survival between natives and unwelcome invasive species.  Most times, these unwanted invaders have negative consequences for the lake’s long-standing residents.  However, there are rare occasions when the native actually benefits.

Kristin Stanford, herpetologist, researcher, and snake lover from Northern Illinois University, has been observing this struggle for over ten years as the Recovery Plan Coordinator for the Lake Erie water snake. She works out of Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory on South Bass Island in western Lake Erie. An expert on these snakes, Kristin, aka “The Island Snake Lady,” works hard to educate students and the public about them, and encourages the islanders to co-exist peacefully with their slithery neighbors.

Lake Erie Water Snake (LEWS)

One of six species of snake found on South Bass Island, Lake Erie water snakes (or LEWS for short) are a species found only in the western basin of Lake Erie, in Ohio and southern Ontario, Canada. The reason the water snakes were listed as a state endangered, federally threatened species in 1999 was due to three primary threats to their population – low population size, habitat destruction, and human persecution.

South Bass Island is a very popular spot for vacationers, with homes built along the shore, boats in the harbor, and hundreds of visitors rattling around the island on golf carts every day. It’s not too far across the water from nearby Cedar Point Amusement Park. Kristin invited us out to the island, one of a series of three small islands – South, Middle and North Bass Islands – to search for snakes.

So, how does one count snakes? Kristin takes a group of five to ten hardy volunteers to fourteen different study sites on the island, to – as she says – “scour the shore line” for all of the adult snakes that they are able to catch.

Kristin’s prime hunting ground is the Scheeff East Point Nature Preserve on the northern point of the island. Our production crew arrived on a hot and humid June morning to find that mayflies had invaded the island, adding to the gross factor of our visit. These insects flew up out of the grass and covered our heads, clothes, and equipment. Luckily, they don’t bite as they don’t even have mouths! Their only career goal is to mate, lay eggs in the lake and die within three days. Once we got used to the mayflies, we turned our attention to snakes.

Hunting for LEWS

At some of their study sites, the researchers place heavy black mats on the ground. The snakes love to snuggle under the mats to keep warm. Kristin warned us that one mat in particular has been doing really well. “When I lift it up, there’s probably going to be about forty snakes underneath.”

YIKES! She wasn’t kidding. There were a bunch, and she gamely grabbed two handfuls of the writhing reptiles. Normally she has several people to help her. Today, she struggled by herself, and managed to get a few into a pillowcase she had brought along as a snake catching bag. And yes, they bite, but they’re not poisonous. She does get bitten in the course of gathering snakes, but they’re usually gone by the next day.

Kristin and her colleagues estimate the number of water snakes by utilizing “mark and recapture techniques.” They insert a small microchip called a pit tag under the skin of the adult snakes they capture, and use the ratio of marked animals to unmarked animals to generate population and density estimates for the Lake Erie water snake.

Kristin plucks a snake out of the grass near the lake shore, and points out the green mark on its back that means it’s been captured and given a pit tag recently. “So what we can do then is scan it and get the pit tag number and re-release it relatively quickly.”

“After we catch the animals, we take some appropriate and annual regular data on them including snout to vent length, mass, we score them for sex and color pattern, and then we also look for the presence of recently consumed prey items. And all that involves is looking for a little bulge inside the snake’s belly. When we see that, we slowly and gently regurgitate that and then we will bring those samples back to the laboratory for further analysis and we identify them to species and that’s how we’re able to determine that the water snakes are eating about 90% round gobies now.”

What are round gobies? No, they’re not fancy marbles. They are a small invasive fish species to Lake Erie, from the Black and Caspian Seas, arriving in the ballast of cargo ships about the mid-1990s. They are considered a very harmful species because they are voracious nest predators for many of Lake Erie’s bottom-dwelling fish and game fish. They gobble up all of the eggs and fry in a very short period of time. And there are BILLIONS of them in Lake Erie now.

So, normally there is not much good to say about an invasive species. But Kristin explained, “It was about the mid to late 1990s when we started seeing gobies pop up in Lake Erie water snake diet samples.”  As they continued to study the snakes, they started seeing more and more gobies popping up in their diet samples, and now, Kristin tells us, round gobies are about 90% of the water snake’s diet.

And what effect is this new menu item having on the Lake Erie water snake? Kristin and her colleagues have been able to show that, since the water snakes have been eating round gobies, “they have increased their growth rate, they’ve increased their maximum body size, so they can grow bigger than they ever could before, they’ve increased their reproductive rate, as well as their survival rate, and population growth rate.” The result – a population explosion of water snakes on the Lake Erie Islands, and also the nearby mainland.

Due in part to the impact of the round gobies, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced on August 15 that the Lake Erie water snake has been removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered wildlife. And that is – at least from the point of view of the snakes AND the Island Snake Lady – “a really great ending to our story.”

 Salt Creek Tiger Beetle Educator Guide

There's the atlas beetle that's black and shiny like a newly washed Harley Davidson motorcycle. There's leafcutter ants that slice leaves off of trees with a cut as clean as a butcher's knife would make. (Those leaves become fungi, which is actually what they eat.) I'd never seen anything like a violin mantis before. This bark-colored creature flexes at the joints as it moves to make it seem more like a robot.

"Eewww!!" That's what a lot of people say when they see bugs. Kay Klatt, Supervisor of the Butterfly and Insect Pavilion at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, says, "That's perfect. That's what gets people interested, especially young people. What is that? What does it do? How does that work? That's what might motivate someone to want to work with insects when they grow up."

The staff couldn't stop telling me about the creatures as they showed them to me. They talked about how many times they've been bitten or what species have bitten them, but they even did that with enthusiasm. I learned a lot about many types of bugs in a short amount of time. But the other thing I learned is that rare and fragile creatures like Salt Creek tiger beetles are in good hands when people like this are looking out for them. The odds are stacked against the tiger beetles, but if they make it, it will be because there are people with a passion to help them.

The passion will be a test of patience for the next several months. All the staff can do with the Salt Creek tiger beetle larvae is feed it. To do that, its food is placed at the top of a tube of soil, then the larvae will come to the top to get it. I was surprised to learn that's about all the staff can do — watch and wait until (hopefully) the larvae turn into beetles and then can be released into saline habitats near Lincoln next spring.

The Salt Creek tiger beetle is one of the most endangered species in the United States, with only two to five hundred beetles left. They're found only in a small saline wetland area just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. We visited the wetland with Mitch Paine, a former research assistant at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln who worked with the beetles and comes back every summer to photograph the Salt Creek tiger beetles.

Produced by Diego Moreno / QUEST Nebraska. Beetle photographs by Mitch Paine.

Seahorses are sold as expensive ingredients used in
traditional Chinese medicine.

Not surprisingly, I jumped at the chance to produce the Quest "Seahorse Sleuth" story, but I will admit that the process of making this piece was demoralizing, to say the least. I spent days in San Francisco’s Chinatown trying to get shop owners who sell Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to talk to me about their trade, and specifically about seahorses. I must have visited 20 or so stores, multiple times, and I saw many hundreds of dried seahorses and thousands of shark fins, not to mention enormous piles of antlers, skins, penises, and whole dried animals. Though I tried many different approaches, no one would talk to me…I was clearly an outsider and not to be trusted. (Had I managed to garner the trust of one of the shop owners, I would have certainly included them in the piece). This experience made me even more impressed and appreciative of the hard work that the folks at Project Seahorse are doing, and exhausted at the thought of how far they still have to go to convince fisherman and governments around the world not to decimate their seahorse populations.

But whereas Project Seahorse must be measured and careful in their approach to these conversations about TCM in order to make headway, I feel that in this blog I can be more forthcoming about my feelings about the use of these animals, and all animals, in TCM.

Of course TCM has a rich history dating back at least 2,000 years, and at least a quarter of the world's population uses this form of medicine. I myself find acupuncture and herbal remedies to be very helpful and do not wish to debunk the efficacy of at least those two parts of the tradition. But I personally draw the line at the use of animals, because I'm a huge animal lover, and I am absolutely appalled at the use of endangered or threatened species for any use. This planet may have seemed endlessly bountiful 2000 years ago, but today we can no longer afford to take the survival of non-human species for granted. To add salt to the wound, it is my understanding that China does not, as of yet, perform the kind of rigorous testing of these products that we must perform for drugs in the U.S. to determine their effectiveness. (This is why we get products from China with arsenic in them, for example). One of the main uses of dried seahorses (and many other dried animals) in TCM is for male virility, though I do not believe there have been any studies that actually prove it has any effect on virility. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s dumbfounding that a country with an official one-child policy, which has led to female infanticide levels that have caused a significant gender imbalance in China, thinks they need to ingest threatened and endangered species to improve the potency of their male population. Let's put the pieces together here folks.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soapbox now, since I'm getting into territory that I am certainly not an expert in. But I did want to present this topic for open discussion – since that's what blogs are for. But before you get too riled up, let me suggest a few websites for further research.

First of all, learn what you can do to help save seahorses by signing on to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seahorse Conservation Page. You can also brush up on the specific uses of Endangered Animals in Traditional Chinese Medicine with this informative paper on Encyclopedia's “Advocacy for Animals” site.

TRAFFIC (The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network) has a new Chinese-language textbook aimed at raising awareness on how to best protect threatened species used in TCM. Lastly, check out The World Wildlife Fund’s FAQ page on Traditional Chinese Medicine.

And that’s just to get you started…the web has plenty of information on this topic…read it and tell your friends!

Watch the Seahorse Sleuths television story online.

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