Woodland Owners are Key to Improving Wildlife Habitat

The northeast region of the United States is home to some of the most densely forested lands throughout the country. With more than half of these forests owned by private landowners, residents play a vital role in conservation efforts of many threatened wildlife species and healthy wooded ecosystems. The American Forest Foundation, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, are working with family woodland owners to enhance and promote the region’s habitat.

Historically, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has worked beside landowners to boost habitat with outstanding results. Below, we showcase just how much we can accomplish when we work as a team.

The Delmarva Fox Squirrel is a great example of a conservation success story by landowners. More than 80 percent of the squirrels forested habitat is privately owned. As landowners continue to support the squirrels with routine timber harvest and farming with sufficient mature forest nearby, the species continues to thrive and expand across the working landscapes of the Delmarva Peninsula.

Rick and Donna Ambrose, landowners and cottontail conservationists. (Photo credit: Kate Whitacre, USFWS)

Landowners, Rick and Donna, along with numerous foresters, farmers, birdwatchers, biologists, hunters and conservationists, have been part of a coordinated effort aimed at conserving the New England cottontail. Rick and Donna have improved and created young forest habitat on their land to benefit New England cottontail and numerous other species, including woodcock, bobcats, snowshoe hares, a broad range of songbirds, box turtles, and frosted elfin butterflies. Their tremendous efforts have helped keep the cottontail off the Endangered Species List.

This is a New England cottontail. Credit: Tom Barnes / USFWS

Additional efforts to support New England cottontail conservation are happening all throughout the Northeast! Benny Caiola is a real estate developer, but for the next several years, he’s going to be developing some of his land with a different goal in mind — restoration of the New England cottontail rabbit. Caiola, who lives in Larchmont, NY, owns 300 acres in Patterson, in Putnam County, that adjoins about 1,000 acres of state land. The land will now be managed to benefit young forest for the cottontails. This type of habitat restoration also benefits approximately 40-plus species, like turkey and deer!

Partners (loggers Joe Zarecki and Faun Koplovsky, forester Doug Ramey, Ted Kendziora with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) stand in front of our first private landowner project in New York. Photo courtesy of Benny Caiola

Working together with motivated landowners and partners is crucial to conservation success. These relationships have been instrumental in developing key projects with great benefit to the species.

Check out the blogs below to see more great stories like these!

Working Lands for Wildlife

Cooperation, Conversation, and Conservation

 

Wednesday Wisdom – Margaret Mead

Original image by the Delaware DNREC

This Delmarva fox squirrel was caught on a remotely triggered camera located in Delaware back in 2004 when this species was teetering on extinction.

Over forty years of concerted, “on-the-ground” conservation efforts by states, landowners and others working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, including bands of “thoughtful, committed citizens,” contributed to the Delmarva fox squirrel’s leap off the Endangered Species list last year.

This major conservation success story highlights exactly what Margaret Mead spotlighted in her famous quote: that “just a few” can bring about change and make a major impact on the health of the “whole.”  Anthropologist, explorer, writer, and teacher Margaret Mead who worked for over fifty years at the American Museum of Natural History was acutely aware of the natural world’s impact on culture and the human experience.  We celebrate her insights this National Women’s History Month as her quote alone has lit many conservation “fires.”

Celebrating a milestone in conservation – and the law that made it possible

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell (left) stands with Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, landowner Rick Abend, Director Dan Ashe and Senator Ben Cardin at the announcement to take the Delmarva fox squirrel off the endangered species list. Photo from DOI.

On Friday, we celebrated the recovery of one of the critters protected on our country’s first endangered species list. Today we’re sharing a post about this milestone written by the director of our agency, Dan Ashe, for the Council on Environmental Quality blog.

Just a few weeks ago, I was at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History remembering an unfortunately dark moment in conservation history – exactly a century before, on September 1, 1914, the last known passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo. You can see “Martha,” as they called her, on display at the museum – stuffed, mounted and behind glass.

And now today, we mark an historic milestone of a far different sort on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. At Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and I were privileged to announce that thanks to concerted conservation efforts by area landowners and other partners, the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel has recovered from the brink of extinction.

Dr. Carol Bocetti of the California University of Pennsylvania holds a Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel. The squirrel is in a fabric cone that is used to handle the captured animals during a fox squirrel population survey. Credit: USFWS/Ryan Hagerty

So why did the passenger pigeon become extinct, while the equally common fox squirrel now thrives across much of its historic range?

The answer is simple. Unlike the passenger pigeon, the Delmarva fox squirrel was protected and aided in its recovery by the Endangered Species Act.

In fact, the fox squirrel was one of 67 species listed under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1967 and later extended protection by the federal law that succeeded it, the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

The successful recovery of the Delmarva fox squirrel is a testament to the dramatic benefits provided by the ESA. Prior to its protection, the species experienced a dramatic decline as the forests it depended on in the Delmarva Peninsula were cleared for agriculture and development. Its range was reduced by more than 90 percent, and in the mid-1960s there was a very real possibility that it would vanish entirely.

Secretary Sally Jewell, Senator Ben Cardin and Director Dan Ashe review photos of Delmarva fox squirrels captured by a trail camera on Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. Trail cameras are one of the methods that has been used to monitor the species over the years. Photo from DOI.

Yet here we are, less than 50 years later, with the Delmarva fox squirrel thriving again. And it wouldn’t have happened without the tools and protections provided by the ESA.  Delistings like this one also remind how the Endangered Species Act can catalyze improvmements to natural habitats that promote ecosystem and community resilience in the face of a changing climate, and how it can be an incentive for community investment by improving regulatory predictability and providing certainty for people and businesses.

The ESA has been an unheralded gift to the nation — an expression of our deep desire to conserve biodiversity, the health of the habitat that sustains wildlife and humans alike, and our willingness to work for it.  For more than 40 years, the law has been remarkably successful, preventing the extinction of more than 99 percent of the species listed as threatened or endangered since 1973. Its protections have helped the Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners reverse the death spiral of hundreds of species, while recovering dozens more. We can take enormous pride in the recovery of species such as the bald eagle, American alligator, Steller sea lion and other species against astounding odds – just like the Delmarva Fox Squirrel today.

If we want a world with polar bears, condors, and salmon, then we have to make deliberate choices to find a place for them. But as the Delmarva fox squirrel shows, it can be done.

Did you miss our infographic on the squirrel’s recovery? By Alexa Marcigliano/USFWS

If you could step back in time and prevent the extinction of the passenger pigeon, would you?  If you answered yes, you have a historic chance to prevent many other equally senseless tragedies; to change the course of history by taking a stand, here and now in favor of species conservation.

The challenges we face today are daunting, but no more so than those faced by our ancestors a century ago. Like them, we need to have the courage to envision something better and grander than the status quo. Thankfully, we have the Endangered Species Act to help us bring people together across the landscape to make our shared vision of healthy, sustainable ecosystems for both wildlife and people a reality.

Click here for a universally accessible version of this awesome graphic.