fieldnotes

• Wildlife Conservation
• Oil
• Interview
• Forest Ecology
• Sitting Ducks
• A Mighty Wind
• What Garbage?
• Patriotic Trees
• Caught on Radar

Wildlife Conservation
The Future Is Now

Two years ago the Bush administration, citing “uncertainty” in the science behind global warming, called for additional studies before taking action. At about the same time, White House officials removed a passage from a report by the Environmental Protection Agency that said climate change posed a legitimate environmental and health concern. “I call [administration officials] climate monkeys,” says Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University. “They hear no, see no, speak no climate change.”

It turns out not everyone in the government is following along. Last year, without fanfare, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) teamed up on a mission, dubbed the Future Challenges Project, to diagnose the gravest threats to America's wildlife and ecosystems. The agencies recently chose four issues to focus on, with climate change heading the list. (The other three are invasive species, water resources, and biotechnology.)

In a joint report, the agencies noted that “surface temperatures are predicted to rise by as much as five to seven degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the United States over the next half century.” (The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1990; a consensus of climate experts now attributes the trend to heat-trapping gases emitted by cars and power plants.) Consequently, the report adds: “Scientists expect increased temperatures to profoundly alter habitat conditions” for wildlife, as well as “the abundance and distribution of plants and animals.” The goal of the Future Challenges Project, says Dan Ashe, a biologist and senior science adviser to the director of the USFWS, is to “better predict and understand those changes,” and then devise appropriate conservation strategies.

That future has already arrived, according to a comprehensive assessment published in December by the Wildlife Society, a federation of professional research scientists, land managers, and educators. The group's three-year analysis concluded that global warming has triggered subtle shifts in bird migration, plant blooming cycles, and the breeding habitats of animals across North America. In Alaska, for example, the reconfigured habitat of the Porcupine Caribou Herd has made it harder for these animals to feed and migrate during the spring. In other parts of the world, animal populations may be unable to withstand the heat— literally. For instance, female leopard geckos, which live in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, tend to become sterile if they're produced from eggs that are incubated at higher temperatures.

If current warming trends continue, predicts the Wildlife Society report, critical breeding habitat for waterfowl will dry up in the prairie pothole region, a vast stretch of seasonal wetlands in Canada and the Midwest. Advocates of greenhouse-gas restrictions, such as Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), said the report “makes our efforts to prevent the worst effects of climate change even more urgent.”

—Keith Kloor

Oil
Arctic Sprawl

The 1.5-million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the plain is often called the refuge's biological heart—is home to a spectacular array of wildlife, from polar bears to caribou and more than a hundred species of birds. It has also become a hotly contested battleground for oil extraction. In a cynical ploy billed as a compromise, drilling proponents in Congress and the White House are pushing a plan, passed by the House in 2001, that would confine development to only 2,000 acres—leaving just a tiny “footprint,” they claim, on the plain's landscape. There's a catch, of course. The 2,000 acres don't have to be contiguous—the sprawling network of roads and pipelines required to connect all these facilities, plus eight 150-acre mines that would provide gravel for processing pads and docks, aren't counted. Audubon Alaska and the Alaska Coalition, which includes 700 groups dedicated to protecting the state's public land, created a hypothetical scenario for development on the coastal plain: It would leave a spidery web of sizeable prints throughout the plain—yet would still technically meet the letter of the law. The map is based on the infrastructure of existing oil fields (and assumes a four-mile directional drilling reach from each site) and on data showing probable oil distribution across the plain. A 2003 review by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the impact on wildlife and vegetation would extend far beyond immediate oil field footprints. One study, for instance, showed that calving caribou are displaced 2.5 miles away from the periphery of industrial infrastructure. “There are those who are talking about [the 2000 acres] as if it were a breakthrough,” says Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska. “But if the oil is widely scattered over the area, this is the infrastructure that would be required to exploit it.

—Jennifer Bogo

Interview
¡Viva las Aves!

Kenn Kaufman's Focus Guide to the Birds of North America became an indispensable pocket companion for many of the country's birders when it was published in 2000. This April a Spanish-language edition, the Kaufman Guía de Campo a las Aves de Norteamérica, will be in bookstores. Audubon asked Kaufman, a field editor for the magazine, about the book's publication.

Question: Why a Spanish edition?

Kaufman: Right at the top of my agenda is getting more people involved in watching birds. There are now 28.1 million people in this country who speak Spanish in the home. It's important to get them on the side of wildlife.

Q: Did your publisher, Houghton Mifflin, suggest the book?

A: Many people asked me, “Why isn't there a Spanish edition of your book?” I asked my publisher the same question back in 2000, but they weren't interested. So I paid for the translation and set up the page layouts myself. I received no advance against royalties, nor will I get any royalties on the first 5,000 copies sold. The book would have to sell 100,000 copies for me to make money on it.

Q: So your target audience is Spanish speakers in the United States?

A: Well, the guide covers mainly the birds likely to be seen here, plus most of those in Baja California and into Mexico within a couple of hundred miles of the border.

Q: Did you play a part in the translation?

A: I've spent a total of about three years in Mexico, plus have visited other Latin American countries, so I know some Spanish. But I wanted to get it right. The book is translated by Patricia Manzano Fischer, who lives outside Mexico City and studied ornithology at Oxford University. During the translation process we stayed in close touch by e-mail.

Q: Any trouble finding ornithological terms to fit your English descriptions?

A: Not really. The trickiest part was mimicking the songs and calls of birds. For instance, in describing the song of the saltapared de Carolina, the Carolina wren, we say melodioso piriu-piriu-piriu-piriu o variantes.

Q: In other words, it's genuine Kenn Kaufman?

A: This guide will have exactly the same color and quality as the English version, and we lowered the price—the flexi-cover edition of the Spanish guide will be $18.95, not $22. My goal is to make the book as accessible as possible to those who could benefit from it. As Roger Tory Peterson used to say, make a birder, make a conservationist.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Forest Ecology
Dead Wood Talking

When a tree falls in the forest, there may or may not be someone to hear it, and it may or may not make a sound. But if it falls in a forest in Europe, from Finland to France and Poland to Portugal, you might hear the sound of a well-meaning forester coming along to clean up the mess. For hundreds of years conventional wisdom in the Old World and beyond has been that downed trees pose a fire hazard or a safety risk or are a sign of bad health, and should be removed to keep the forests looking as spotless as a Swiss parking lot.

But a new study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is challenging these age-old notions. In fact, it confirms what biologists in the United States and elsewhere have argued for years: Dead wood is vital to forest health. And in many European forests, it has reached critically low levels. “Basically,” says Daniel Vallauri, a forest specialist with the World Wildlife Fund in France, “we've got about 30 percent of forest species—birds, insects, many bats—linked to cavities, very old trees, and trees which are dead or decomposing.”

Today most European forests have been so tidied up by overzealous managers that many of those species across the continent, including the white-backed woodpecker and Bechstein's bat, now face an acute lack of habitat—even extinction. There is also a serious danger to many of the beetles, mosses, and fungi that occupy a crucial niche in the forest's life cycle.

The natural level of dead wood varies, but in one untouched forest in Poland, the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, it ranges from 1,243.3 to 2,286.6 cubic feet per acre. In most European forests, by contrast, dead-wood levels have fallen to between 14.3 and 71.5 cubic feet per acre. The WWF report is calling for those levels to be raised to 285.8 to 428.7 cubic feet per acre by 2030.

To meet this goal, the WWF report suggests increasing the number of protected areas, adding more species dependent on dead wood to endangered species lists, and identifying and protecting key sites. In the end the WWF recommends not only a change in policy but also mentality. “I guess in society as a whole, we grow up with an aversion to death,” says WWF forest ecologist Duncan Pollard. “But when you cut out dead wood, you're cutting out an important chunk of the chain from life, through to death, and back to life again.”

—Frank Bures