Soaring population gets bald eagle off threatened-species list

The once-disappearing bald eagle is everywhere. Twenty pairs nest along the Cooper River alone.

On Thursday, the American symbol was removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered species.

The "de-listing" has been acknowledged as a success for the Endangered Species Act. The eagle became the symbol of the act, and its recovery from near-extinction in the lower 48 states has become an icon of the conservation movement.

President Bush called the de-listing "a wonderful way" to celebrate the Fourth of July. He said the bald eagle's resurgence after a four-decade fight should be credited to cooperation between private landowners and federal and state governments.

The whooping crane and the manatee are now being considered for "de-listing" from endangered to threatened, a move that would ease restrictions on what people can do around their habitats.

Not everyone thinks these species have adequately bounced back. So few whooping cranes are left in the East that the deaths of 17 in Florida during a winter storm was considered catastrophic.

The Lowcountry's first mating pair in a century and a half have begun winter roosting in the ACE Basin only in the past two years. The manatee is making a modest recovery in some areas, but dying in greater numbers to watercraft strikes.

The question becomes whether the federal act is doing its job by bringing back animals from near-extinction, or if it's losing its teeth.

Pacific Legal Foundation, the property rights attorneys who sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to force reviews to potentially de-list animals, said the eagle's status change still gives it unneeded protection with land-use restrictions, according to the news release on the foundation Web site. It plans to sue again over those protections.

"If the protections afforded the eagle after de-listing from the ESA are the same as those before de-listing, then the eagle's much-vaunted recovery is a media ploy of smoke and mirrors," foundation attorney Damien Schiff said on the Web site.

"...Even the construction of a few modest vacation cabins within the vicinity of an unoccupied eagle's nest may still be prohibited."

Environmentalists said the eagle has recovered thanks largely to the federal act, but that a testy mix of politics and science is driving the current round of animal reviews.

De-listing animals such as the whooping crane or the manatee is entirely inappropriate, said Derb Carter, of the Southern Environmental Law Center. "Unfortunately not all species have been the success the bald eagle has been."

The bald eagle was removed from the "threatened species" list; it had been reclassified from endangered to threatened in 1995.

Today, there are nearly 10,000 mating pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous 48 states, compared to a documented 417 in 1963, when the bird was on the verge of extinction everywhere except Alaska and Canada, where it has continued to thrive.

The eagle, whose decline came during years in which it was often targeted by hunters and later became a victim of the pesticide DDT, will still be protected by state statutes and a federal law passed by Congress in 1940 that makes it illegal to kill a bald eagle.

Fish and Wildlife is developing guidelines on how that law will be implemented. It also is developing a permitting system to let landowners develop their property and still protect the eagle population.

Carter said he is alarmed by a U.S. Interior legal opinion earlier this year stating that animals are eligible for endangered species listing only if they are threatened with extinction in their current range, rather than the range they covered in the past. Under those parameters the eagle would never have made the list, he said.

Save the Manatee Club director Pat Rose, who was a Fish and Wildlife biologist involved in the original listing of the manatee, said the creature is making a modest recovery in some areas, but the review doesn't take into account that the numbers of watercraft increase as time goes on.

More than half of the adult manatee deaths are from watercraft strikes, and 92 of the known 3,200 manatee died last year, Rose said. While the threats and risks are getting worse, the review is intended to relieve political pressure being brought by development interests, he said.

Craig Rieben, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman, said the service didn't do the reviews when it was sued because it didn't have enough staff to do them.

"In de-listing, the decisions are made according to the best evidence. It's a process-oriented act. We do our best."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.