Last Chance

On my request Swindle assessed palila mitigation graphically but dispassionately. U.S. taxpayers had paid to buy back the grazing leases and to construct high, elaborate fencing. Then at least one of the ranchers, after receiving public funds to give up his lease, grazed his cattle on it for free and inside a protective fence. Mouflon mongrels still infest the mitigation area. But he said he’d heard that the gates had finally been closed and the cattle removed.

“Well, no,” I told him. When Banko and I had inspected the mitigation area on January 7, we’d encountered six cows. The grass inside was shorter than the grass outside; plantings had been heavily browsed; and the black, moldering, cow-killed mamane snags imparted the ambience of a World War I battlescape.

Conant, who has watched seven Hawaiian bird species go extinct during her 45-year career, has also watched as, in her words: “Palila habitat has gone from bad to better, back to bad, on to worse; and finally, today, surveys show that parts of palila critical habitat look like a sheep ranching operation. . . . Year after year species continue to decline and go extinct. Year after year our legislature fails to find sufficient funding for fencing and ungulate control—something the state is under court order to do.” It makes her “ashamed to be a citizen of the State of Hawaii.”

Still, her state’s gross malfeasance is not atypical; few others would do better had their birds evolved in isolation. Nationwide, compliance with and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act is almost nil; and the departments of Interior and Commerce consistently refuse to list species that will surely vanish without aggressive intervention. Few Americans will notice the loss of another honeycreeper, but the loss of species is like the loss of rivets in an airplane—sooner or later there’s a reckoning. What’s more, a society that can’t or won’t preserve its native wildlife can’t or won’t preserve itself.

Saving most endangered species—Snake River salmon or black-footed ferrets, for example—is daunting, at times seemingly hopeless. But there’s a huge difference with palilas. Salvation is simple and relatively cheap. Get the sheep off Mauna Kea, and the species has a future.

First, however, the state needs to be rousted from torpor and timidity. That may be about to happen. Attorney Koalani Kaulukukui of Earthjustice, representing the Sierra Club, the Hawaii Audubon Society, and National Audubon, wrote the state on November 21, 2008, requesting that it agree to make construction of mouflon-mongrel fencing around palila critical habitat a legal stipulation instead of just a stated good intention and to do so by last December 12. The deadline came and went. On January 7, 2009, the state officially declined. So on March 23 the plaintiffs went back to court.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Urge your legislators to insist that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforce the Endangered Species Act on Mauna Kea. To learn more about the effort to save the palila click here.