AP | NOAA Proposes Major Habitat Protections For Killer Whales. According to E&E News, “U.S. protections for the waters that a group of endangered orcas call home could soon expand beyond the Seattle area to encompass much of the West Coast, from the Canadian border to central California. NOAA issued a proposal yesterday to increase the critical habitat designation for southern resident killer whales by more than sevenfold under the Endangered Species Act. Just 73 orcas remain in the Pacific Northwest population, the lowest number in more than three decades. They’re struggling with a lack of chinook salmon, their preferred prey, as well as toxic contamination and vessel noise. The NOAA proposal calls for an additional 15,626 square miles of federally protected habitat that would run from the border with Canada down south to Point Sur, Calif. The designation means federal agencies must ensure that activities they pay for, permit or carry out do not harm the habitat, but it does not generally affect approved recreational or commercial activity such as whale watching and shipping, said Lynne Barre, NOAA Fisheries’ recovery coordinator for the whales. ‘It only affects federal actions, so where there is a federal permit or grant or federal decision, that’s what’s protected,’ Barre said.” [E&E News, 9/19/19 (=)]

 

Editorial: Gavin Newsom Just Decided To Carry Trump’s Water By Vetoing An Endangered Species Bill. According to Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “On the eve of President Donald Trump’s visit to California this week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his intention to veto a bill that would have protected the state’s iconic migratory salmon and many other endangered species from the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. The timing is unhappily fitting. Trump used his visit to trash the California air with his announcement that he was revoking the state’s power to set its own tough tailpipe emission standards. Now Newsom may help him drain California’s rivers to further the president’s effort to divert more water to agricultural and urban uses. At issue is Senate Bill 1, a reasonable bill that would have kept in place, as state standards, the federal regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act as they existed the day before Trump took office. Trump has made clear his intention to weaken those protections. He has expressed a special antagonism toward — and ignorance of — California water and its role in sustaining the state’s unique and fragile ecology. Remember, this is a president who claimed that the state’s drought was caused by state law, not by the fact that it stopped raining for seven years. During last year’s deadly wildfires, Trump said the flames spread because we had pumped all the water into the ocean and didn’t have any left for firefighters. What nonsense.” [Bozeman Daily Chronicle, 9/19/19 (+)]

 

The Quiet Disappearance Of Birds In North America. According to The Atlantic, “In the early afternoon of September 1, 1914, Martha the passenger pigeon, the last of her kind in the world, passed away, and her entire species disappeared with her. But before that instant of extinction, there had been decades of decline, as hunters killed what was once the most common bird in the world. Billions of passenger pigeons became millions, thousands, and then hundreds, until eventually one became none. Few people took note of this decline as it happened: There still seemed to be a lot of pigeons, and their abundance obscured their downfall. History is now repeating itself—across the entire avian world. A new study, which analyzed decades of data on North American birds, estimates that the continent’s bird populations have fallen by 29 percent since 1970. That’s almost 3 billion fewer individuals than there used to be, five decades ago. ‘It’s a staggering result,’ says Kenneth Rosenberg from Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy, who led the analysis. ‘This is a critically important study,’ says Nicole Michel, an ecologist at the National Audubon Society. Past work has shown that specific groups of birds are declining, but this is the first study to rigorously put a number on the full extent of these losses. And surprisingly, it shows that the most ubiquitous birds have been the hardest hit. ‘The common wisdom was that we’d see the rare and threatened species disappearing and the common, human-adapted ones taking over,’ Rosenberg says. Instead, his team found that 90 percent of the missing birds came from just 12 families, and that they were all familiar, perchy, cheepy things such as sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, finches, larks, starlings, and swallows.” [The Atlantic, 9/20/19 (+)]

 

 

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