TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Environmentalists contend that federal officials responsible for overseeing the recovery efforts of an endangered songbird have betrayed it instead and accelerated its likely extinction.
The government's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued permits allowing the potential destruction of nearly one-fourth of the Southwestern willow flycatcher's population, the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity said in a report released this fall.The agency approved habitat destruction "disastrous" for three large populations of flycatchers three years ago, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman concedes. But now, it is doing everything it can to reverse the trend and save the flycatcher, said Jeff Humphrey of Fish and Wildlife.
The town of Kearny, about 80 miles southeast of Phoenix, designed its airport and wastewater treatment projects to ensure flycatcher habitat would not be harmed. And surveys this year have found a number of previously unknown flycatcher sites on the Gila River in Arizona's Pinal County, as well as in Colorado and Utah, Humphrey said Thursday.
Even so, "it's no secret the flycatcher is going extinct," he said.
The small, graceful migratory songbird depends on riparian (riverside) forests to feed and breed. The population has diminished to about 450 pairs in fewer than 70 isolated and widely scattered sites, the Tucson-based Southwest Center said.
Loss of habitat stems primarily from dams, livestock grazing, invasive species, development and the nest-invading parasitic brown-headed cowbird, it said.
Most of the potential breeding sites the agency approved for destruction were at three dam locations: Lake Mead on the Nevada-Arizona state line, Roosevelt Lake in Arizona and Lake Isabella in California, Humphrey said.
The dam-enlarging projects, which eventually will drown the trees where the flycatchers breed, were approved before or at about the same time the bird was listed as endangered in 1995, Humphrey said.
The Southwest Center had to sue Fish and Wildlife twice over the flycatcher to win a court ruling ordering the endangered listing in 1995.
"Fish and Wildlife resisted listing the flycatcher, tooth and nail, and ever since has continued to stonewall protection for this graceful bird," said Noah Greenwald, an ecologist and the author of the Southwest Center's report.
The Mead and Roosevelt approvals are still being appealed, Humphrey said.
Those permits prompted a Fish and Wildlife biologist to write in an April 1997 internal memo that the flycatcher "is being piecemealed to extinction" with the service "turning a blind eye to the aggregate effects" of its actions, Greenwald said.