Greater Expectations for Wildlife

Tucked away among some long forgotten and useless legal papers, I found a newspaper clipping from July 13, 1988, on NJ's Bald Eagle restoration program. The uncredited article for the Beacon, a defunct local paper serving Cape May County, described our efforts to bring Bald Eagles back to the Delaware Bay. As a young wildlife biologist for the Endangered Species Program, (and still sporting a full head of hair), I piloted this effort.

It was a grim time for Eagles then. After decades of decline, the estimated original population of nearly 30 pairs, plummeted to just one nesting in the last great forest of Delaware Bay - Bear Swamp. The lonely couple could not fledge young because within the female's reproductive system lurked a syndrome of complications, that left their eggs too thin to withstand incubation. Every year the monogamous couple, who mate for life failed to produce young, yielding to the unyielding impacts of the persistent toxic chemical DDT.

Few remember that the 80's were the beginning of the right's assault on natural resource conservation and in particular declining wildlife. Ronald Reagon and his ultra-conservative Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Ann Gorsuch Burfort (mother of the recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch) and Secretary of the Interior James Watt, led a wholesale assault on environmental protection and wildlife conservation, hiding it all under the rubric of landowners rights. Euphemistically called the Wise Use movement, they spoke of ditching the Endangered Species Act, most wetland protection laws - in fact, most of the environmental achievements of the early 70's. Then as now, a juggernaut of the rich and powerful aimed to squeeze every cent from a rapidly impoverished ecological landscape on both private and public lands. Funding went on the decline. Agencies laid off staff to both save funds and remove barriers for the schemers hoping to cash in on the new order.

The Beacon published the Eagle piece in 1988, almost exactly when the right was doing their worst to the land. I'm writing this blog because of the last line in the article "Biologist hope to establish as many as 8 to 10 pairs of nesting eagles in NJ through this project". The NJ eagle population now stands at over 150 pairs! So why this success in the climate of dismal expectations for wildlife? More important what can we learn from this wonderful success now in this time of rapidly diminishing hope for wildlife in the US. Can we hope for more?

read the full blog here