Youths to G7: Protect Our Generation

What if governments finally decided to act on climate change and environmental degradation?

Later this month world leaders will gather in Hiroshima, Japan for the 49th G7 summit, the annual meeting devoted to issues of global diplomacy. Will they listen to the voices of their youngest constituents and act on climate change?

A few weeks ago the Y7 — the G7’s official youth engagement group — concluded work on our Youth Communiqué. Developed by youth representatives from each country in the group, it proposes policies to heads of state on pressing global issues like climate and environment, peace and security, global health, economic resilience, and digital innovation.

This year’s Y7 Climate and Environment discussions, in which I represent European Union youth, call on the G7 to ensure a just and orderly transition, restore biodiversity and protect ecosystems, and prioritize and finance resilient human settlements. After months of youth consultations, those recommendations have now been handed over to the Japanese G7 presidency, Prime Minister Fumia Kishida.

While leaders read our recommendations as part of their stated aim to take an intergenerational approach, one question continues to spiral in my head: What if our governments decided to act on climate change and environmental degradation as if this will affect our generation?

Several rows of people sitting and standing in a formal pose — Youth delegates with Prime Minister Fumia Kishida.

We’re left with seven years to act for life within planetary boundaries, as shown by the latest IPCC report. Considering the rapidly closing window of opportunity to limit the global average temperature rise to below 1.5°C, the viability of humanity rests on the actions we take today.

High-income and high-pollution countries need to lead the transition, granting our generation the basic human need to walk on healthy soils and breathe clean air. Our G7 Youth Communiqué asks for nothing more than this.

In truth 1.5°C should not be considered a target but a ceiling. Overshooting this means entering a blind spot: overstepping planetary limits in which life has flourished for millions of years.

The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C is not just a temperature rise of 0.5°C. It means that climate risks will be at least twice as disruptive. Considering nearly half of the world’s population lives in the danger zone of climate impacts, every fraction of a degree counts.

We already see the disproportionate effect of 1.1°C warming above preindustrial levels, particularly on the lives of vulnerable communities — those that have contributed the least emissions and pollution.

At the same time, public and private financing of fossil fuels is still greater than for climate adaptation and mitigation.

As governments continue to shake hands with the fossil fuel industry, current climate policies are projected to increase global warming by 3.2°C in 2100.

A row of people at a table, one speaking into a microphone — Youth representatives discuss climate issues. Photo: Maxime van Hoeve

The Y7 Communiqué will not be the last message from my generation demanding change. Another scientific report, youth engagement group and United Nations initiative will follow — all repeating the same message.

Yet what we need is the political will to comply with Earth’s nine planetary boundaries.

These boundaries — climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, biogeochemical flows of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, freshwater use, change in land use, erosion of biodiversity, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities — are required for us to live in harmony with nature. By now, 6 out of 9 have been crossed due to human activity, particularly in high-income countries.

So unless we substantially change our socioeconomic structures — how we work, move, produce and communicate — the stability of global ecosystems is put at stake.

True action asks us to give up current economic models requiring unrelenting growth to produce and consume products and services which conflict with the planet’s natural metabolism.

True action asks us to rethink our relationship with nature as an integrated part of life whilst moving towards absolute resource use reduction.

True action allows our and future generations the basic human need for breathable air, clean water, and sustainable food systems.

With these goals in mind, our Y7 Communiqué calls on the G7 to:

- Phase out and commit to no new investment in the exploration or production of fossil fuels by endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, redirecting investments into renewable energy projects and prioritising energy demand reduction.
- Strengthen loan-free climate financing mechanisms — and embed the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, intergenerational dialogues, and decolonial frameworks in all climate policies.
- Deliver socially equitable commitments to reverse biodiversity loss, deforestation, and soil degradation by acting on the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 target and endorsing responsible nature-based solutions.
- Lead the transition to regenerative agriculture and plant-based food systems by divesting from intensive monocultures, acting on the Global Methane Pledge and establishing ambitious animal welfare standards for livestock.
- Support the United Nations Convention for the Laws of the Seas by enforcing international surveillance systems against illegal, unregulated and unreported fisheries, ending dangerous indiscriminate fishing techniques, and banning deep sea mining.

In the next seven years, high-income countries like the G7 can and must decide to act on climate change and environmental degradation — taking an active stance for climate justice by limiting unfolding damage.

Our generation depends on it.

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Making Shift Happen: Momentum Grows for New Thinking About River Restoration

An unconventional gathering helped spur ideas to speed the pace and scale of river restoration projects across the West.

Brian and Pat Robertson first noticed something wrong nearly 30 years ago. A stream called Little Bear Creek ran through their property in northern Idaho, but the waterway had long ago been altered during a logging operation and essentially functioned as a ditch, carrying water swiftly away from the valley. Trees were dying; the water table was dropping; neighbors were digging dry wells. After consulting with Natural Resources Conservation Service and touring several Forest Service restoration projects in Oregon, the Robertsons decided to take the creek back to Stage Zero.

Stage Zero is like hitting the reset button to a time before the stream had formed a channel. With help from 10 agencies, the Robertsons filled in their stretch of Little Bear Creek until it was flush with the surrounding landscape. They scattered large logs about to help slow the flow of water. Then the stream could decide where it wanted to go: spreading out in fingers across a valley; pooling in wetlands; creating little micro-habitats — places where water-loving plants could grow, insects could hatch and young salmon could thrive.

Since the restoration at Little Bear Creek began more than five years ago, the water table has risen several feet. The meadow is transforming into a wetland. In time, the Robertson say, willows may return, then beavers.

The Robertsons’ project is an example of process-based restoration. This approach differs from conventional form-based restoration, which emphasizes building discreet structures and modifying a river channel. Process-based restoration is about restoring functions, and its scope expands beyond the channel to include the floodplain and valley bottom — the whole riverscape.

Chris Jordan, a fisheries biologist at the Nation Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was an early pioneer of process-based restoration. In 2009 he led an experiment sinking posts into a riverbed in central Oregon to give beavers points of attachment for their dams. The beavers responded. Four years later the water level had risen, and juvenile steelhead had increased by 175%. The processes set in motion not only improved the quality of the habitat, but the quantity, too.

Could the same thing happen elsewhere?

River systems across the West are degraded from logging and grazing, channelization, the removal of beavers, and the construction of dams, diversions, dikes and roads. Twenty-eight species of salmon and steelhead are currently listed under the Endangered Species Act.

There’s a whole industry — Jordan calls it the restoration-industrial complex — focused on form-based restoration: building log jams, excavating river channels, and populating riverbanks with native plants.

“There’s billions of dollars being spent, yet on the salmon recovery side of things, we’re not seeing the ecological uplift of the projects,” he says. Notably, you do see those benefits with process-based restoration projects, which include such things as removing dams and breaching levees as well as newer strategies such as building beaver dam analogs. But they aren’t happening fast enough to address the crisis at hand.

“I think it’s crystal clear that everyone in the restoration community and people throughout government understand that we’re dealing with catastrophic species and habitat loss that’s only going to be exacerbated by climate change,” says Erika Lovejoy, director for Sustainable Conservation’s Accelerating Restoration Program. “If we don’t do the restoration more quickly and put these solutions in place, we’re going end up dealing with everything on an emergency basis.”

An Unconventional Workshop

Jordan and his colleague at NOAA, senior policy advisor Irma Lagomarsino, wanted to get more people on the process-based restoration bandwagon. Their solution: a special workshop called Restoring Riverscapes. The three-day event, held this March, gathered students and scientists; fluvial geomorphologists, aquatic ecologists and fish biologists; civil engineers and regulatory specialists; private landowners, tribal members and ranchers — in the same virtual room.

“The workshop was designed to help the very large community in California, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho to learn and think together about potential solutions or ideas to expand the rate and the pace and the scale of process-based habitat restoration,” says Lagomarsino.

Jordan and Lagomarsino didn’t want Restoring Riverscapes to be an ordinary workshop. They brought on a team of producers, led by filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg, who, among other projects, produced the award-winning feature documentary The Beaver Believers.

Two people standing in marsh installing poles — Three beaver dam analogs were installed Woods Creek, a tributary of the Cispus River, WA. Photo: Cascade Forest Conservancy, public domain.

Restoring Riverscapes took over a year to plan. Koenigsberg helped them shape the workshop experience like a story, with a clear narrative arc. They created a color-coded chart of the presentations: inspiring stories of stewardship interspersed with pre-recorded presentations and live panels — no snoozy PowerPoints. The planners knew they would have to appeal to people from career restoration practitioners to graduate students to decision-makers — many of whom aren’t scientists.

“We needed to change people’s minds,” says Jordan. “And you don’t change someone’s mind when they’re asleep.”

The first half of the workshop laid the foundation: explaining what process-based restoration is, why it works and showcasing examples. A trio of career Forest Service biologists traced their long evolution as restoration practitioners who now embrace the concept. Lisa Huntington talked about restoring a creek and floodplain in a Portland neighborhood. A short film presented the Robertsons’ story.

With help from a team of filmmakers, editors and other creatives, Koenigsberg produced this and three other films specifically for the workshop. The films are moving, the production values high. Storytelling is critical for winning hearts and minds, she says. “When you see other people who persevere and were inspired and didn’t give up, that’s what gives us this inspiration to go try, and to also keep at it.”

Cutting the Green Tape

Midday on Day 2 the focus pivoted to why it’s so hard to get more of this work done. Topping the list are regulatory compliance, landowner cooperation and funding.

Restoration projects typically require a host of permits: water quality certification, removal-fill permits from the Army Corps of Engineers, floodplain development permits from the county, Endangered Species Act compliance…the list goes on. Whether seeking permission to build a beaver dam analog or a bridge, the regulatory requirements are the same, and they are costly and time consuming.

“The systems that were created to protect the environment and stop bad things from happening were designed for development type activities,” says Lovejoy. “They aren’t designed to help fix the environmental problems that we face in any type of efficient manner.”

Lovejoy is part of a coalition that successfully lobbied the state of California to create separate streamlined permitting pathways for restoration projects. Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot took up the cause, launching Cutting the Green Tape, an initiative to accelerate ecological restoration across the state.

Cal Trout is taking advantage of a new programmatic permit for its project on Big Chico Creek in Northern California, which aims to restore over eight miles of salmon and steelhead habitat. They estimate it will cut permitting time in half and slash costs by $250,000.

Aerial view of narrow creek with large boulders. — Fish ladder and rock fall barrier in Big Chico Creek, Calif. Photo: Mike Wier, courtesy of Cal Trout.

During her presentation, Lovejoy outlined the ingredients needed to catalyze such a sea change: strong coalitions, empowered agency staff, and support from leadership. She hopes other states, or maybe even the West as a whole, can develop similar initiatives to speed restoration efforts.

“When you have the permitting, the technical assistance and the funding under one roof, I feel it helps change the mindset,” she says. “You’re not regulating development, but helping steward restoration.”

The Human Dimension

In many cases restoration projects need to happen on private land: farms, ranches and urban neighborhoods. But how to earn the cooperation of people who may care about different things than you do?

To address that question, two social scientists presented at Restoring Riverscapes. Laura Van Riper, with the Bureau of Land Management’s National Riparian Service Team, shared ways to build trust with landowners and communities affected by restoration projects. Hannah Gosnell of Oregon State University talked about rivers as social-ecological systems.

Lagomarsino lobbied to include the social component in the workshop.

“A lot of us don’t have the tools and the concepts at hand,” she told me. “We just think we’re doing this really important work.” But cooperation requires trust, and the key to gaining that trust is finding ways to appeal to different values. That may require talking less about salmon and more about how a wetland could create a fuel break, helping protect a community from fire. Or how a restored riverscape could help a rancher through the dry season.

Gaining trust and engaging diverse stakeholders might be one of the most important challenges, Lagomarsino told the virtual audience in a session on collaborative conservation. But “it might be our greatest opportunity to expand the scale, pace and efficacy of process-based actions.”

Next Steps

Over 1,200 people showed up (virtually) for Restoring Riverscapes. Lagomarsino and Jordan are still sifting through mountains of comments and figuring out how to build on the momentum.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Koenigsberg. “That’s really hopeful to me. It can be hard to maintain positivity when we’re facing such an uphill battle.”

One of the workshop’s aims was to nudge people into seeing, thinking and talking about rivers in a new way.

Some of the bullet points Gosnell, the social scientist, used in her discussion of Resilience Thinking — embrace dynamism; work with Mother Nature; relinquish control — could have easily belonged in a different workshop. At one point she read aloud comments she’d captured from other workshop participants:

Rivers are a series of scenes in a really long movie.

Rivers need room to play, like kids on a playground.

We need to think of riverscapes as biological beings with agency.

The final keynote speaker was Amy Cordalis, cofounder of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation and Yurok Tribal member. She talked about the Tribe’s long advocacy to remove four dams on the Klamath River — the biggest process-based restoration project ever — and the reciprocal relationship between people and rivers. She invited the hundreds of people hunched over screens all over the West who care deeply about rivers, salmon, people, and the future health of our planet, to draw strength from the very ecosystems they’re working to repair.

“The river, if you ask it, the water, if you ask it, will tell you what you can do to help it to get back to that good place,” she said.

Previously in The Revelator:

Standing Up for Freshwater Biodiversity

The Regions Most at Risk for ‘Statistically Impossible’ Heat Extremes

Regions that have been lucky so far may be less well prepared for an unprecedented heatwaves in the future.

In the summer of 2021, Canada’s all-time temperature record was smashed by almost 5℃. Its new record of 49.6℃ is hotter than anything ever recorded in Spain, Turkey or indeed anywhere in Europe.

The record was set in Lytton, a small village a few hours’ drive from Vancouver, in a part of the world that doesn’t really look like it should experience such temperatures.

Lytton was the peak of a heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada that summer and left many scientists shocked. From a purely statistical point of view, it should have been impossible.

I’m part of a team of climate scientists who wanted to find out if the Pacific Northwest heatwave was unique, or whether any other regions had experienced such statistically implausible events. And we wanted to assess which regions were most at risk in future. Our results are now published in the journal Nature Communications.

Tracking these outlier heatwaves is important not just because the heatwaves themselves are dangerous, but because countries tend to prepare to around the level of the most extreme event within collective memory. An unprecedented heatwave can therefore provoke policy responses to reduce the impact of future heat.

Map of temperatures across PNW. — Map of temperatures in the Pacific Northwest during the 2021 heatwave. Photo: European Space Agency, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

For instance, a severe heatwave in Europe in 2003 is estimated to have caused 50,000-70,000 excess deaths. Although there have been more intense heatwaves since, none have resulted in such a high death toll, due to management plans implemented in the wake of 2003.

One of the most important questions when studying these extreme heatwaves is “how long do we have to wait until we experience another similarly intense event?” This is a challenging question but, fortunately, there is a branch of statistics, called extreme value theory, that provides ways in which we can answer that exact question using past events.

But the Pacific Northwest heatwave is one of several recent events that have challenged this method and should not have been possible according to extreme value theory. This “breakdown” of statistics is caused by conventional extreme value theory not taking into account the specific combination of physical mechanisms, which may not exist in the events contained in the historical record.

Implausible Heat Is Everywhere

Looking at historical data from 1959 to 2021, we found that 31% of Earth’s land surface has already experienced such statistically implausible heat (though the Pacific Northwest heatwave is exceptional even among these events). These regions are spread all across the globe with no clear spatial pattern.

We also drew similar conclusions when we analyzed “large ensemble” data produced by climate models, which involve computers simulating the global climate many times over. These simulations are extremely useful for us, since the effective length of this simulated “historical record” is far larger and thus they produce many more examples of rare events.

However, while this analysis of the most exceptional events is interesting, and cautions against using purely statistical approaches for assessing the limits to physical extremes, the most important conclusions of our work come from the other end of the spectrum — regions that have not experienced particularly extreme events before.

Some Places Have Got Lucky — So Far

We identified a number of regions, again spread across the globe, that have not experienced especially extreme heat over the past six decades (relative to their “expected” climate). As a result, these regions are more likely to see a record-breaking event in the near future. And with no experience of such a huge outlier, and less incentive to prepare for one, they may be particularly harmed by a record heatwave.

Socioeconomic factors, including population size, population growth and level of development will exacerbate these impacts. As a result, we factor in population and economic development projections in our assessment of the regions that are most at risk globally.

Our at-risk regions include Afghanistan, several countries in Central America and far eastern Russia among others. These regions may be surprising, since they are not those people typically think of when considering extreme heat impacts of climate change like India or the Persian Gulf. But those countries have recently experienced severe heatwaves and so are already doing what they can to prepare.

Central Europe and several provinces in China, including the area around Beijing, also appear to be vulnerable when considering the extremeness of the record and population size, but as more developed areas they are likely to already have plans to mitigate severe impacts.

Overall, our work raises two important points:

The first is that statistically implausible heatwaves can occur anywhere on the Earth, and we must be very cautious about using the historical record in isolation to estimate the “maximum” heatwave possible. Policymakers across the globe should prepare for exceptional heatwaves that would be deemed implausible based on current records.

The second is that there are a number of regions whose historical record is not exceptional, and therefore is more likely to be broken. These regions have been lucky so far, but as a result, are likely to be less well prepared for an unprecedented heatwave in the near future. It is especially important that these regions prepare for more intense heatwaves than they have already experienced.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

How Cities Are Preparing for the ‘Silent Killer’ of Extreme Heat

California Condors vs. Avian Flu: Can the Endangered Birds Survive?

An outbreak has killed 20 condors in the Southwest, putting wildlife conservationists on high alert.

This story is jointly produced by Sierra and The Revelator.

In Arizona, fans of the endangered California condor frequently gather at the historic Navajo Bridge at Vermilion Cliffs, near where some of the very first condors were reintroduced to the wild, to watch breeding adults engage in their ritual courtship dances. The male stands in front of his mate, his dark, glossy wings spread, bald head bowed, circling her in a slow strut, rocking from one foot to the other.

Spring, when bonded pairs tend to their gawky, fluffy gray chicks, is a good time to celebrate the comeback of the Pleistocene-era vulture that very nearly went extinct before being returned to the wild in 1992. In late March The Peregrine Fund, which manages the Arizona-Utah flock, announced that the first eggs of the 2023 season had been discovered. “We have quite a few other pairs we suspect are nesting but haven’t been able to confirm yet, so we expect the numbers to climb over the next few weeks,” condor program director Tim Hauck wrote in a Facebook post. “We had 13 confirmed nesting attempts in 2022, the highest number since the establishment of the AZ-UT population in the late 1990s, and we’re hoping to equal or even best that number this year.”

The celebration was cut short when staff noticed a condor — a nesting female — acting lethargic. On March 20 a field crew went and collected the bird, who had died below her nest. Meanwhile other birds had sickened.

On April 7 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that three condors from the Arizona-Utah flock were confirmed to have died of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or avian flu. The horror continued. Fish and Wildlife set up an Incident Command Team to deal with the outbreak. By April 17, 20 condors had died — about 20% of the entire flock, which had numbered 116 birds before the flu outbreak.

It’s impossible to say how the condors first contracted the deadly flu, says Joanna Gilkeson, public affairs officer for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The highly contagious virus can be transmitted from bird to bird, through feces, or by ingesting an infected animal.

To reduce the risk of lead poisoning, staff from The Peregrine Fund regularly supply uncontaminated carcasses to their flock. As soon as they suspected avian flu, they stopped providing the sociable condors with supplemental food and water. They hoped that by discouraging the remaining birds from congregating, they could reduce the chance of transmission.

Several condors cluster together — Photo: Bob Wick/BLM

The comeback of the California condor is often celebrated as one of the greatest success stories in wildlife conservation history, but an episode like this highlights how fragile the species still is. “Even though we have more than 500 individuals in the world, we’re not out of the woods,” Hauck says.

The avian flu outbreak among condors highlights the worrying rise of this new threat among wild birds at a time when many species are already facing serious declines.

Low pathogenic avian influenza is widespread in both domesticated poultry and wild birds, especially geese and ducks. It usually doesn’t cause severe symptoms or disease. But the virus can mutate into a highly pathogenic strain.

This happened in North America in 2015, when 50 million domesticated birds, mostly chickens and turkeys, died or were culled. Though devastating to the livestock industry, wild birds were largely unaffected.

A newer subtype called H5N1 made landfall in North America in Newfoundland in December 2021. The first cases appeared among domestic fowl, then seabirds. Soon outbreaks were being reported among wild birds all over Canada and the United States.

This outbreak is different, says Johanna Harvey, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland who is leading an effort to track the spread of H5N1 in North America.

H5N1 is impacting wild birds more than it ever has, says Harvey. The disease is ravaging seabirds, shorebirds, and raptors. Tens of thousands of colony-forming seabirds have died, as have scores of Caspian terns, hundreds of bald eagles, and countless birds that we don’t know about. Songbirds don’t seem to be susceptible.

“Equally important is the diversity of wild species that are being impacted, including many sensitive species,” says Harvey. “And it’s happening at a time when wild birds are facing steep declines because of habitat loss, degradation and climate change.”

H5N1 is also not fizzling out as previous subtypes have. “We’re seeing sustained disease throughout the year,” Harvey says. Because of this, birds are continuing to spread it around the globe as they migrate.

“This huge diversity of highly migratory species like gulls and skuas — and other birds that we know have unique migration patterns — are moving the disease in ways we haven’t seen before,” says Harvey. H5N1 is expanding into Central and South America. “Antarctic populations may be next, which would be disastrous.”

Harvey and her fellow researchers are urging a coordinated management approach, involving as many decision-makers as possible, to help respond to the crisis and its many unknowns. Their findings were published April 26 in Conservation Biology.

If there’s any silver lining to this HPAI outbreak, it’s that the vast team of partners involved in condor conservation already coordinate closely with each other. Flock managers had been preparing for a potential outbreak for nearly a year, ever since it became clear that H5N1 was killing wild birds.

Ironically, the fact that California condors remain so endangered and isolated offers them some protection. When conservationists began re-establishing wild populations in the late 1990s, they deliberately created distinct flocks: in northern Arizona/southern Utah; Baja, Mexico; Southern California; and Central California. More recently condors have been reintroduced in Northern California’s redwood country.

“These are five truly separate flocks,” says Kelly Sorenson, executive director at Ventana Wildlife Society, which co-manages the central California flock. “Except for rare instances of mixing between the southern and central California flocks, we’ve never documented movement among those sites.”

The geographic separation was by design, to ensure that if a disease or natural disaster were to strike one flock, it would likely not impact the others. Today about 350 condors fly free, and there are more than 200 birds in captivity. All of the flocks are supplemented with captive-bred birds, but condors are successfully reproducing in the wild, too. The biggest check on their overall population growth is lead poisoning, which accounts for half of all wild condor deaths and remains the birds’ greatest threat.

“The problem is, because bird flu is transmitted by wild birds, there’s really nowhere to hide. It’s scary in that regard,” Sorenson says.

Condors tend to hang out on ridges — high and dry places that aren’t friendly to viruses. But the sociable birds drop down to water sources — and on the coast, to beaches to feed on marine mammals. There they come into contact with shorebirds, known carriers of HPAI.

HPAI has been detected in California, but so far no condors have contracted it. In addition to careful monitoring, managers of the central and Northern California flocks have launched fundraisers so they can acquire or build quarantine pens. Ventana Wildlife Society raised $85,000 in a week, allowing the organization to order 10 pens, which in a worst-case scenario could contain up to 30 condors. If staffers detect a sick bird, they will immediately capture and isolate it. The mesh on the pens is fine enough to keep other birds from entering, and the design prevents other birds from roosting (and pooping) on top of the pens.

Because The Peregrine Fund uses radio telemetry and GPS to track individual condors, its staff has been able to locate and recover sick birds who are still alive and most of the dead birds who could potentially spread the disease. “I really truly think that because of the level of monitoring we’re doing, that we’ve limited the number of mortalities,” Hauck says. “As bad as it is, it could have been a lot worse.”

The live birds retrieved by crews in Arizona were severely dehydrated and malnourished. “They’re suffering from the flu; we all know what that’s like,” Hauck says. “Now think of a flu that’s worse than any flu you’ve ever had.”

Originally, eight condors were taken to Liberty Wildlife. Four soon died. Veterinarians are providing the four remaining birds with the avian equivalent of chicken soup: fluids, vitamin B complex, and a single shot of meloxicam, which reduces inflammation. The birds are improving and Hauck is cautiously optimistic that they will recover.

“HPAI is usually fatal in other species,” Hauck says. “This is new for condors, and what we’re seeing is, it does look like some of the birds are able to get through it, which is very hopeful given the high mortality rates that have been documented in other species that contract this virus.”

Condors who recover will have natural immunity and shouldn’t contract the H5N1 strain again. They will also likely have some degree of immunity even to new mutations of the virus. In the near future, flock managers may be able to vaccinate condors against HPAI.

“USDA and U.S. Fish and Wildlife are having conversations about trial runs for vaccines for condors, specifically,” Gilkeson says.

The Peregrine Fund is raising money to help pay for the extra travel, lodging and field time for its staff, and for transporting and treating sick birds. The response has been overwhelming, with donations from 48 states and several countries. Just as important has been the emotional support, especially for field staff reeling from the loss of 20 condors, including 11 adults that were actively tending eggs or young.

Some birds that could have been potentially been exposed to HPAI are still tending to their nests. “That’s a plus,” Hauck says. “The fact that we still have breeding birds that are seemingly uninterrupted is heartwarming for us.”

How You Can Help: Official Guidance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

If you see a condor exhibiting any of the following signs of illness in Arizona or Utah, please contact The Peregrine Fund at 928-352-8551 or [email protected]. Signs include lethargy, incoordination, presenting as dull or unresponsive, holding head in an unusual position, and walking in circles.

Please follow these best practices to help limit the spread of the virus and avoid bird-human contact:

- Report dead or sick animals to your state wildlife agency.
- Keep your family, including pets, a safe distance away from wildlife.
- Do not feed, handle or approach sick or dead animals or their droppings.
- Always wash your hands after working or playing outside.
- Prevent contact of domestic or captive birds with wild birds.
- Leave young animals alone. Often the parent animals are close by and will return for their young. For guidance on orphaned or injured wild birds, please contact your nearest wildlife rehabilitation center, state wildlife agency, or local land management agency.
- USDA also has biosecurity guidance for people who keep backyard poultry.

Previously in The Revelator:

Bird Flu Outbreaks: When Will We Learn Our Lesson?

What Sound Can Tell Us About Our Changing World

As new technologies supercharge the field of bioacoustics, researchers can better listen to environmental changes — and use the information to guide conservation efforts.

After Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, photos showed downed trees, flooded communities, collapsed homes and buckled roads. But what did the aftermath sound like?

Ben Gottesman, now a member of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab, was part of a team of researchers from Purdue University’s Center for Global Soundscapes and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that monitored changes in the soundscape on land and in the water to better understand how birds, bugs, shrimp, fish and other animals responded to the disturbance.

The work is part of the growing field of bioacoustics, which combines biology and acoustics to gain insight into the world around us by listening. It’s become a potent tool for research and conservation as recording devices have improved and gotten cheaper — and as machine learning can crunch massive amounts of data. That’s helped researchers from the Yang Center and other institutions better understand everything from right whales in the North Atlantic to tiny katydids in the canopies of tropical forests.

The Revelator spoke to Gottesman about which animals bioacoustics can help us study, how researchers sort through millions of hours of recordings, and why new technologies aren’t just for experts.

You did your Ph.D. in soundscape ecology. What is that?

It’s the study of sound in our environment and trying to understand places through how they sound. That can be learning about biodiversity through recording and analyzing the sounds from different ecosystems or doing a more comparative approach where you’re trying to understand what makes this tropical forest sound the way it does. What are all the sounds in a given place? How do they vary over space and time?

I think a lot of places have something to tell us about either environmental issues or interesting behaviors.

What can sound tell us about a changing world?

It can tell us a lot. You can look over decades where you see ocean noise levels doubling every 10 years, and that corresponds with this increase in shipping. These long-term anthropogenic stressors, a lot of them are tied to changes acoustically.

Likewise long-term changes in biodiversity also convey acoustically. There was a big study led by the Cornell Lab that found that 3 billion birds were lost [in North America] since the 1970s. I imagine that that’s led to a desaturation of dawn choruses, which is a peak period of biophony, or sounds produced by animals. Biodiversity loss carries an acoustic signature in many places with a desaturating soundscape or a loss of dynamics.

Then over shorter time scales, you have impacts such as logging or mining that can also have a large effect on the soundscape as well. Through that we can learn about changes to the animal communities.

In my work I studied the impact of Hurricane Maria. It’s not a direct human-caused disturbance, but there was a marked reduction in dawn chorus periods where usually you have a whole vibrant mix of birds that are singing. That declined sharply after the storm, likely signifying the initial damage wrought by this intense hurricane. The insect choruses were depleted as well.

But then we had these hydrophones recording just a few miles away, and there was very little change. The fish choruses were present during the night just like before. The snapping shrimp were still snapping away at very similar levels. That was one example early on that gave me this firsthand experience learning about how soundscapes can convey ecological changes.

People are trying to use passive acoustic monitoring as a tool to understand the degree to which places are being affected by all kinds of different stressors. But it can also [be used to understand] restoration. Acoustics is a really great way to understand what species are profiting from such restoration, how long it takes for places to bounce back, and what restoration methods are most effective given your management goals. My colleague Vijay Ramesh just published a paper about understanding the effectiveness of restoration using passive acoustic monitoring.

What kinds of tools are used for this?

There are passive recording technologies, and those are typically recorders with battery and storage that you can leave outdoors. The SwiftOnes that we make at the Yang Center can record for more than a month continuously. Underwater, the tech is more advanced. We’ve developed underwater recorders called Rockhoppers that can record for more than a year straight as deep as 1,000 meters.

Cornell Researcher Builds Groundbreaking Machine Learning Toolkit For Bioacoustics | The Cornell Daily Sun https://t.co/xNQM497iOP

— Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics (@CornellSounds) November 10, 2022

There’s a lot of next steps or frontier areas. We’re working toward real-time detection and streaming of sounds. So let’s say you’re interested in some sort of human stressor like illegal logging or poaching, the ability to record, but also to analyze and then ping out what’s going on in real time — that’s an area that people are actively working on. We have some units in Hawai‘i that are doing just that, which is quite exciting.

One shortcoming of these fixed sensors is that they’re robust through time, but they don’t cover a big area. So to complement that, there are also acoustic gliders in marine environments. There’s some that just drift, and then others that you can program routes. We’re thinking about how that can take shape terrestrially, potentially using drones. That’s one area that people are thinking about in order to increase the spatial resolution of acoustic sampling.

How do you analyze all this data?

That’s one of the big challenges. When I think of even just a few months of data from a few sites, I get the image of a glacier of sound. How are you able to break that up into more manageable units or get some insights and analyze this mountain of data? Especially as projects scale, it’s increasingly important to have automated tools that can go through and find signals that you’re interested in or make automated measurements of the soundscape.

In the case of a bioacoustic monitoring project in the Sierra Nevada led by Connor Wood, each year it collects more than a million hours of sound from more than 1,000 sites. He’s worked with Stefan Kahl to create BirdNET, this very powerful algorithm for classifying bird sounds within an audio data set. That’s just one example of these machine learning tools that are changing the game and making it possible for us to analyze these enormous soundscape data sets.

You mentioned birds, which is what I often think of with acoustic monitoring. What other species are we able to learn about now with acoustic tools that we have been missing before?

I can think of Laurel Symes’ work. She uses passive acoustics to understand the biodiversity and relative abundance of katydids in tropical forests. Most of these katydids live high up in the canopy, and their sounds are ultrasonic. So even if you’re there trying to survey them, you won’t be able to hear them.

Green bug on green leaf. — A round-headed katydid. Photo: Terry Priest (CC BY-SA 2.0)

But with passive acoustic monitoring, you can get a sense of their behavioral patterns and phenology, which is how their vocal activity changes over the course of the year. And then ultimately, the golden goose is to get a sense of how many of these insects are in these forests because they’re such a critical food source in these tropical forest communities.

That’s one example. But there’s so many. A large part of the work at the Yang Center is dedicated toward the marine environment in places like Antarctica or off the coast of California or Cape Cod Bay, which is home to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. These animals are extremely difficult to survey, if not for passive acoustic tools.

Especially in aquatic environments, whether it’s freshwater or marine, acoustics is really giving us a window into studying creatures that otherwise are really logistically difficult to survey.

Can this kind of technology be used by regular people?

Yes, and there’s a tremendous power in making tools accessible to a wider audience. That’s happening with these acoustic technologies. BirdNET, which I spoke about earlier, is an app that anybody can download and use to identify the birds singing in their environment. Merlin is another app from the Cornell lab that has the similar goal of recording and detecting different bird species on your cell phone.

As citizen science continues to be on the rise with eBird and iNaturalist, I think sound will become an increasingly large part of those efforts. You can go out and record the sounds of different species and archive them in this huge, publicly accessible library, called the Macaulay Library at Cornell.

Equipping people with the tools to do this automated classification of different sounds around them is actively happening now — mainly with birds — but that will expand.

Once you have names for things, it makes you appreciate them more and it’s a real portal toward facilitating more learning and engagement. I’m a big believer that sound has the power to do that.

Sound has captivated me, and it can really spark something in people. It could be sounds from Antarctica or it could be your backyard pond with water beetles clicking and bugs doing these rhythmic whirrs. The surprise and mystery can just captivate you and make you want to go outside — and hopefully do some recordings yourself.

Previously in The Revelator

The Call of the Wild: Using Sound to Help Imperiled Species and Ecosystems

Species Spotlight: Wollemi Pine, a ‘Living Fossil’ We’re Saving From Extinction

One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees survives at a secret gorge in Australia, but it still faces many threats — from fire to fungi.

Wollemi pines are among the rarest plants in the world, with fewer than 100 trees left in their native habitat. They were known only by fossil records until 1994, when a thicket of about 40 massive, conifer-type trees was discovered in Wollemi National Park, in Australia’s Blue Mountains.

Scientists quickly dug into identifying these then-unidentified trees, working in heavy secrecy to protect their location. Eventually they found fossil evidence in stone that matched the living trees — confirming that a tree species they had thought was extinct, in fact, still existed.

Since then, scientists and horticulturists have worked to ensure that this species survives. One way is through propagation techniques and growing the trees in gardens. It’s a slow process: The Wollemi pine has very controlled growth, sometimes taking up to 25 years to reach its first 20 feet in height.

Species name:

Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis)

Description:

With their tough, fern-type fronds and dark brown, oddly “bubbled” bark, Wollemi pines have a distinct, unusual look. They’re tall, coniferous trees with needle-like leaves, that can grow to 130 feet in height. Their trunks can reach up to three feet in diameter, and it’s common to find numerous trunks emerging from a single root base. Wollemi pines reproduce vegetatively and by wind pollination. They are monoecious plants, having both male and female cones on each tree, and extremely long-lived: Some trees in their native habitat are estimated to range from 500 to 1,000 years old.

Where it’s found:

The Wollemi pine is native to Wollemi National Park, west of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, where it occurs along a creek, in a deep and sheltered sandstone gorge in the Blue Mountains.

IUCN Red List status:

Critically endangered

Major threats:

Their limited geographic distribution and small population size make Wollemi pines extremely vulnerable to disease and wildfire. Pathogens threatening the trees include Phytophthora cinnamomic, a mold that causes root rot, and Botryosphaeria, a group of disease-causing fungi species.

Notable conservation programs:

Wollemi pines are critically endangered, with their native populations scattered within isolated pockets of Wollemi National Park. The trees are protected through wildlife conservation efforts, and the locations of the wild groves are kept secret to prevent damage and disease introduction.

Their isolation doesn’t always protect them: The catastrophic Gospers Mountain megafire of 2020 burned more than 1.2 million acres and nearly destroyed the last remaining native populations of Wollemi pine. Luckily the Australian government noted the significance of these isolated forests and deployed a specialized team of firefighters to safeguard the cherished groves. In a coordinated effort, air tankers dropped fire retardant while crews on the ground set up irrigation systems to hydrate the environment. The strategy proved successful, and very few of the trees were consumed by the fire. Photos of the aftermath showed a desolate and charred landscape, with verdant pockets of Wollemi pines standing tall.

Outside of their protected locations, Wollemi pines grow in several horticultural facilities around the world — including San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which currently has two Wollemi pines and five more growing in propagation.

The top of a tall tree from a medium distance — Photo of Wollemi pine at San Diego Zoo Safari Park

The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is also engaged in Australian plant conservation through our support of the Australian Network for Plant Conservation. Our funding helps support wildfire ecology and recovery research. The relationship began after the devasting Australian wildfires of 2019/2020.

It’s not just the professionals keeping these trees alive. Australian residents can order Wollemi pine seedlings to grow in their backyards, a unique conservation effort that helps ensure the species’ genetic viability.

My favorite experience:

I have never had the opportunity to see Wollemi pines thriving in their native habitat, but during a recent trip to Australia, I did have the opportunity to visit the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne, where I enjoyed discussing horticulture management best practices for these pines with the staff horticulturists. Their cultivation techniques have helped inform our own horticulture practices and provided clarity to some of our observations and experiences in San Diego.

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

A combination of in situ protection along with ex situ cultivation helps safeguard this critically endangered species. There is also a considerable amount of collaborative plant science research on Wollemi pines occurring in academic, governmental and botanic garden settings. The research is predominantly focusing on:

- Understanding how the Wollemi pine grows in its native habitat, and in cultivation
- Investigating germination requirements and seed banking potential
- Banking seeds that can be conserved through seed banking, and developing alternative conservation measures
- Providing plants for display, interpretation and reintroduction
- Passing on lessons learned to the wider community.

Choosing Which Corals to Move Where

Scientists at dozens of labs around the world are collaborating on this type of work through the Restoration Genetics Working Group under the aegis of the Coral Restoration Consortium. Matz, a member of the group, operates the Matz Lab on the UT campus in Austin, more than 200 miles from the nearest coast. Its research focuses on how reef-building corals adapt to different environments and respond to climate change at the genomic level.

To create the Florida maps, Matz and a handful of graduate and undergraduate students sampled corals at more than 60 sites, then sequenced their DNA. The environmental data, which goes back to 1995, came from the Southeast Environmental Research Center Water Quality Monitoring Network at Florida International University. Those data include surface salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, total organic nitrogen, how much light penetrates the water column, and dozens of other parameters. Henry Briceño, a professor at FIU who runs the network, says his team goes out quarterly to collect samples and take measurements at 112 stations throughout the Keys.

Bleached plate corals and sea fans on Molasses Reef, Key Largo. Photo: Matt Kieffer (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Matz has put the combined datasets to good use. “We have mapped adaptation and can use that if you want to move corals around and predict where they will survive,” he says. “Get a matrix of genotypes and a matrix of the seascape and find the best alignment and you get magical things. You can predict adaptation over whole seascapes, even where you didn’t sample corals.”

To Matz, the most interesting thing about seascape genomics is what it says about the conditions that corals are facing. But several studies also support it as a viable management strategy. For example, in 2020 researchers identified reefs potentially adapted for heat stress in the northwestern Pacific and revealed how they disperse to neighboring reefs, creating a metric that could be used to prioritize reefs for restoration or protection in that region.

The Caribbean has seen significant restoration activity over the past few decades. Here, a Coral Restoration Genetics Working Group paper concluded that corals raised in nurseries and then secured onto reef habitat in the ocean — a process known as outplanting — should come from genetically unique colonies both locally and at a distance.

Traditionally, restoration for any organism has favored sourcing only from local areas. But the working group suggests that needs to change for corals.

One possible approach is assisted gene flow or assisted migration — deliberately moving entire organisms, larvae or genes (through breeding) from one area to another. Migration happens naturally and allows adaptation in one population to improve the fitness of others. Assisted gene flow speeds up the process; it can be particularly important where corals are not dense enough or genetically diverse enough to support successful sexual reproduction, or in scenarios of rapid environmental change.

Elkhorn coral spawning. Photo: Brett Seymore/National Park Service

Those conditions pretty much describe the Caribbean, where a major problem is long-term recruitment failure by the two major reef-building species, elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) and mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata). Recruitment failure means that larvae created by sexual reproduction, which travel on ocean currents for up to two weeks before settling on existing reef structure as polyps, are not settling and growing into adults.

“If we don’t fix the recruitment problem, these corals will go extinct and no amount of restoration will change that,” Matz says. “Some people are hoping conditions will fix themselves, but I’m skeptical. I think these two species are functionally extinct.”

Matz has a controversial solution: Bring in non-native corals.

Going the Distance

“We need to import other species from other geographic areas,” he says. “That idea is not popular, but the situation is drastic.”

He doesn’t mean corals from just a few miles away.

“I think we need to rewild the Caribbean with corals from the Pacific Ocean,” Matz says. “A controlled invasion.”

Pacific corals “live fast and die young,” he explains, which means they can recover more quickly from adverse environmental events than slower-growing, longer-lived corals. If it works, it could give local fish and other species that depend on reefs their own opportunities to recover.

Current recommendations apply assisted gene flow only to native species — and even that is a tough sell to many in the Caribbean region and Florida.

“I think the idea of introducing non-native species, at least at this point, is a ‘bridge too far’ for almost everyone,” says Margaret Miller of SECORE International, a nonprofit that is producing corals via sexual reproduction for outplanting and researching strategies for improving the process. “If we reach extinction or virtual extinction for many Caribbean corals, I think this is an approach that might be truly a last-ditch effort to maintain coral reef function there. Obviously, we are working pretty hard to avoid this scenario.”

Matz readily acknowledges that the conventional wisdom says to keep things where they are and that translocation is bad. “That is true when things are good,” he says. “But when they are bad, we must let or even make things move.”

Things are bad enough that we need to start thinking about that possibility right now, he says. “It could have some unintended consequences, so we need to do some basic, safe research first and not just jump in. We need to at least allow some research on it.” He notes that so far, authorities at NOAA have strenuously objected to his inquiries about permits to conduct such research.

One of the concerns is the potential spread of disease, but Matz says the Caribbean “is riddled with disease already.” Reef-building corals reproduce both sexually and asexually, and translocating larvae or gametes rather than adult fragments likely would minimize that risk, according to the working group paper. Research could further refine these methods.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Existing research has paved the way for other actions.

“We have proven there is a genetic basis for heat tolerance in corals and that selection based on this variation can produce higher heat tolerance,” Matz says. “Corals do exchange variants over long distance — that’s validated by patterns of ocean currents, which carry coral larvae. If heat is the only problem corals face, it looks like there is enough resilience to keep some alive for a while.” His research suggests that “a while” could be at least 100 years.

The Restoration Genetics Working Group paper provides specific guidelines for restoration practitioners. The group also is seeking funding to develop a tool to sequence coral DNA in the field rather than having to take samples back to a lab. That would help local restoration experts quickly identify, and move, the best corals.

And Matz’s seascape genomics maps of the Keys are set to move from his computer screen to a scientific journal soon, providing another tool to guide restoration.

“In a perfect world, we would not be doing research simultaneously with restoration, but time is short,” says Miller, who also is a co-author on the working group paper. “Restoration investment is not going to matter unless we can get the real world back to a healthy, happy home for corals. That is going to take a whole host of actions that need to proceed in parallel.”

Bottom line, scientists — and the rest of us — may need to start thinking about even more extreme measures to save these vital habitats.

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Busy Cheetahs, Critical Lions, Surging Tigers and Other Big Cat News

This month Links From the Brink has a pack of good-news stories about wild, endangered felines.

The news about our planet seems to get worse every day. When you dig a little deeper, though, you can find progress going in the right direction all over the world. It’s not all-encompassing, and it’s not enough, but it may give you hope to keep fighting for a better future.

This month a good deal of that hope comes from the world of big cats — tigers, cheetahs and other feline predators. And it all starts with a story I thought I’d never hear.

Multiplying Cheetahs

I’ve been writing about endangered species for 19 years, and in each of those years people have proposed restoring cheetah populations to India — or actively blocked efforts to repopulate the subspecies.

Asiatic cheetahs have a long and storied history in India. Rulers tamed the big cats centuries ago, but they were also hunted for their pelts and faced both habitat loss and depletion of their prey. Cheetahs couldn’t outrun these problems; Humans wiped out the last Asiatic cheetahs in India about 70 years ago.

People started talking about reintroducing the animals almost immediately after the last ones died, but the controversial idea faced resistance at every turn. Proponents went all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court in 2009, which blocked plans for another decade.

But the court changed its mind a couple of years ago, and finally, just last September, Namibia gifted eight African cheetahs — a related subspecies — to the nation of India, including five females. That fall, after a brief quarantine, the cats were released into Kuno National Park to great fanfare.

South Africa provided another 12 cheetahs last month, illustrating the international support for the effort.

But something else happened last month that was even better: Some of those initial cheetahs gave birth to four little cubs — the first cheetahs born in India in more than seven decades.

Tiny newborn cheetah cubs in the grass — Photo: Ministry for Environment, Forest & Climate Change

“I congratulate the entire team of Project Cheetah for their relentless efforts in bringing back cheetahs to India and for their efforts in correcting an ecological wrong done in the past,” environment minister Bhupender Yadav said on Twitter when he announced the news.

Unfortunately the news was tinged with a bit of sadness: One of the female cheetahs imported from Namibia died of suspected renal failure just the day before the birth announcement.

Still, this rare case of rewilding a large predator proves that India can support cheetahs — and it has proven successful enough to inspire imitation. This month Nepal announced that it, too, was interested in importing cheetahs to the country. It’s unclear if Nepal ever had native cheetahs, so this may or may not fly. But with cheetahs facing range restrictions and poaching wherever they live, giving them one or two new places to exist and thrive can only help.

One last thing to mention: This isn’t a perfect reintroduction. For one thing, creating space for nonnative African cheetahs has effectively blocked the hope of establishing a second population of Asiatic lions, who currently live in just one site in Gujarat, where a disease could easily rip through the entire subspecies.

For another, this offers little benefit to Asiatic cheetahs, who remain all but extinct, with only 50 or so left in Iran. Until the pressures threatening that species have been alleviated, the native cheetahs of Asia remain in a race against extinction.

Counting Tigers

More good news out of India: The population of wild tigers there has surged to 3,167. That’s up from just 1,411 in 2010 and represents a major victory for tiger conservation and worldwide efforts to boost the big cats’ populations.

bengal tiger — A Bengal tiger in India. Photo by Bernie Catterall (CC BY 2.0)

For many years the total number of tigers worldwide hovered at just 3,200. India now has almost that exact amount.

The governments of the world have missed their self-imposed deadline to double the tiger population by 2022, and the threats to tigers remain, but this illustrates the progress is still being made at least in some tiger range countries.

Also in Tiger News

Scientists have shown the big cats have individual personalities, a discovery that could have implications for their conservation. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise — all cats have personalities, as any housecat owner can tell you — but it could allow for customized approaches to benefit each tiger, and through the individuals help the population as a whole. As the journal Science reported, “Understanding how a particular tiger is wired may help conservationists manage its interaction with nearby human inhabitants, livestock, and even other tigers.”

Lions Return # 1

The last time I wrote about West African lions, way back in 2014, things didn’t look good. The genetically distinct population — relatives of the extinct Barbary lion — had fallen to about 400 animals scattered across 11 nations. Today the population is even smaller, somewhere between 120 and 374 animals, according to Panthera, the big cat conservation organization.

But that number is just part of the story. This March Panthera announced that a West African lioness named Florence had just given birth to her third litter, this one containing three young cubs.

Lioness with two cubs — Photo: Panthera/DPN/Everatt

Mama and family all live in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which now holds 30 lions and healthy prey populations — an amazing conservation victory. Panthera hopes to raise that population to 100 lions by 2030, something that seems eminently doable if they keep breeding the way they are.

That park has represented hope for West African lions since the 2014 study that first documented their decline, as conservationist Philipp Henschel told me that year:

Henschel says the most rewarding encounter occurred in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park. They had been searching the area for more than a month under extreme heat — “over 95 degrees Fahrenheit even at night” — when they finally spotted a big cat. “What says it all, concerning the rarity of the lion in the park, is that not one of my four survey team members, all long-serving national park service staff, had ever seen a lion in their lives. It was extremely rewarding to see how excited they all were to finally have seen the animal that is also a symbol of national pride in Senegal.”

Lions still face enormous threats throughout West Africa. Food for large predators is nearly nonexistent, habitats are shrinking, and poaching of lions and their prey animals remains rampant. But this conservation success in Senegal proves that lions have a future here and in other West African countries.

Lion Return # 2

Meanwhile, in the Central African nation of Chad, a lion has turned up in Sena Oura National Park for the first time in 20 years.

Nighttime photo of a lioness — Photo: WCS, Govt. of Chad

A press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society calls her a “beautiful lioness, in her prime and clearly in great health.”

The press release continues:

The region saw a period of ruthless, organized poaching more than a decade ago, but has since benefitted from a very strong commitment to conservation by the governments of both Cameroon and Chad. This has produced better protection of the national parks and wildlife populations are now starting to recover.

Adjacent Bouba N’djida National Park in Cameroon supports lions, which are now increasing and appear to be recolonizing parts of their former range, including Sena Oura.

Western and Central African lions need all the help they can get, and this double dose of good news should help to support future conservation efforts.

Tick Tock

Protecting big cats in the wild also necessitates protecting them in captivity. In the United States, that’s the role of the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was finally passed into law this past December. Thanks to this important regulation, people will no longer be allowed to own or breed tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards, cheetahs and other newly prohibited wildlife species.

This is a big deal for big cats, about 20,000 of whom are estimated to be in private hands in the United in the United States alone. These animals often suffer under cramped, inhumane conditions, and have sometimes been bred from multiple species or subspecies, making them useless for conservation. Countless people have been injured or killed by privately owned cats, many of whom have been displayed in roadside zoos or other “attractions” (think “Tiger King”). Conservationists have long suspected that some privately bred cats ended up in the illegal trade, either as live pets or body parts, which further fueled demand for wild cats, nearly all of which are endangered.

Ownership of most of these big cats was previously legal under certain lax state laws. That’s finally ended. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this month declared that people who own big cats have until June 18 to officially register them, after which they will be allowed to possess them but not breed or sell them.

Ideally possession of most of these 20,000 big cats would now shift to accredited sanctuaries, where they would spend the rest of their lives in safety. But private ownership of big cats is one of the major threats to their survival in the wild, and now one major market for the animals is closed. We call that a victory.

Cats As Gardeners?

A new study further emphasizes the ecological value of mountain lions. Researchers found that when cougars kill their prey, the carcasses deliver nitrogen to the soil, which inspires more plant growth, which sets the stage for higher herbivore populations.

Which, of course, sets the dinner table for another helping of mountain lion prey, which starts the cycle all over again.

“To those who care for the well-being of wildlife and the wild habitats sustaining all living beings,” researcher Mark Elbroch told Mongabay, “these findings yet again demonstrate the value and need to conserve the Americas’ pumas.”

The One Bit of Bad News This Month

A mountain lion in Wyoming has died from avian flu, possibly after eating infected birds. Expect to hear a lot more about this rapidly spreading disease in the months to come.

Stamp of Approval

Finally, in feline philately news, the Florida panther is one of 20 threatened animals honored on a new set of stamps commemorating this year’s 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.

Each stamp bears a photo by National Geographic “Photo Ark” creator Joel Sartore. The set will go on sale next month, after which there will be more photos of Florida panthers in circulation than there are actual Florida panthers.

Previously in The Revelator:

Tigers and Wolves: The Reigning Cats and Dogs in Conservation?

Elders Seek to Supercharge Climate Action

Activism isn’t only for the young. Many seniors are eager to join the climate movement — and they have the power to achieve key goals, says Bill McKibben.

Last month thousands of senior Americans took to the streets in 30 states to demand that the country’s major banks divest from fossil fuels.

This “rocking chair rebellion” — organized by Third Act, a fast-growing climate action group focused on older Americans — shows that Baby Boomers are becoming a new force in the climate movement.

Third Act cofounder Bill McKibben, who joined a Washington, D.C., protest, says it’s unfair to put all the weight of climate activism on the shoulders of young people. It’s time for older Americans to take a central role.

“Young people don’t have the structural power necessary to make changes,” McKibben tells The Revelator. “But old people do. There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. Many of us vote, we’re politically engaged, and have a lot of financial resources. So if you want to press either the political system or the financial system, older people are a useful group to have.”

The March protests hope to build on an earlier success. In December Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, announced that it will stop investing in new oil and gas projects. McKibben says activism and pressure from Democratic politicians, many at the state and city level, will eventually force U.S. banking giants to follow suit.

“The amount of attention and anger that the climate crisis is creating keeps rising and rising and at some point, even players as big as Chase and Citi and Wells Fargo and Bank of America are going to have to listen,” he says.

These four banks provided $1.2 trillion in funding to the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2021 — a quarter of all the financing that oil and gas companies received in that period.

Win-Win Activism

Third Act’s National Day of Action to Stop Dirty Banks, when many people over 60 sat in rocking chairs in front of bank branches and cut their credit cards, showed that older climate activists are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

A line of colorful rocking chairs at a climate protest — Photo: Third Act

Retired Baby Boomers have plenty of time to spare, control more than two-thirds of the country’s household wealth, and their ranks are increasing rapidly. By 2050 people over 65 are expected to account for nearly 22% of the country’s population, up from around 17% at present.

Researchers are seeing an increase in climate activism among older Americans, says Karl Andrew Pillemer, a sociologist and gerontologist who is the Hazel E. Reed Professor of Human Development at Cornell University.

Older climate activists tell The Revelator that in addition to joining protests, they help increase climate change awareness in their communities, lobby local leaders and legislators, write newsletters, and join regular webinars and meetings.

One of their main motivations is the welfare of future generations.

“When people reach their 70s and beyond,” Pillemer says, “psychological research shows that they become motivated by ‘generativity’ — that is, a desire to contribute to a future that they themselves may not live to see.”

Dave Freedman, a member of Elders Climate Action, says he and his wife joined the climate movement when they retired, partially because they have two kids and two grandkids. “And we were concerned about the future for them and others. I mean, it’s not just my kids, it’s all kids and all grandkids,” the 73-year-old says.

But elders are also being prompted into action by “self-interest,” says Pillemer. Research shows that older adults are more vulnerable to air pollution and extreme heat, while they often have compromised immune systems that make them more prone to water- and insect-related illnesses, which are set to increase as the planet continues warning.

Another reason why climate action is a win-win for Baby Boomers is that there is a very clear correlation between volunteering and well-being.

“We’re trying to share this with our community members so they understand that what they’re doing isn’t just some nice to do,” says Peter Kaldes, president and CEO of the American Society on Aging. “It’s actually impacting their health and well-being in a positive way.”

A couple of years ago, Jim Thompson, the founder of THIS! Is What We Did, a climate action group for people over 50, didn’t know anyone in the climate movement.

“And now I’ve got new friends, some of the most amazingly wonderful people in the world to work with on this. It’s kind of a blessing,” he says, adding that climate activism has filled him and his peers “with a sense of purpose.”

Although people who identify as Democrats are often more likely to take part in climate action, sources say the partisan divide is not as obvious among elders. Many older Republicans have joined the climate movement because Middle America is packed with farmers and outdoorsy retirees who enjoy hunting and fishing; the kind of people who have seen the impacts of severe drought, devastating hurricanes, and floods with their own eyes.

Elders are also motivated by a sense of nostalgia. “Baby Boomers are responsible for the climate activism of the 1960s and 1970s,” Kaldes says. “What we see is a real renaissance, a real desire to revive this activism of theirs.”

Perhaps that’s why poetry, live music, dance and art installations played a central role in the March 21 protests. McKibben, who is 62, says this joviality is partly the result of the “generational muscle memory” of senior protesters who joined the Civil Rights movement back in the 1960s and the first Earth Day in 1970.

Bill McKibben stands at a microphone — Photo: Third Act

The most high-profile member of this new wave of senior climate activists is Jane Fonda. Last year the actress, feminist and long-time civil rights advocate, who is 85, unveiled a climate PAC to help elect politicians with a climate action agenda and counter the political influence of the fossil fuel industry.

Generational Divide

And yet sources say elders face many barriers when it comes to environmental activism.

Polls show that people over 60 are less likely than younger generations to consider climate change “a top concern” or get involved in climate action. In addition, many Americans don’t understand climate science well and fail to see the correlation between the climate crisis and respiratory ailments and mental health issues, and older adults are no exception. That’s why rising awareness of the climate crisis is a priority for many senior climate activists.

To make matters worse, Pillemer says some environmental organizations are not particularly “elder-friendly” and often fail to make a concerted effort to recruit older people or offer opportunities for volunteers with less physical ability, effectively creating a generational divide in the climate movement.

To fill that gap, over the past 10 years, Cornell University has run the Retirees in Service to the Environment program in New York, Florida, Illinois and other states.

RISE provides training and group support to older citizens interested in joining the climate movement. It includes six educational sessions on topics such as climate change impacts, green energy and water quality.

The final goal of the program, Pillemer says, is not just to educate older Americans but to build a movement based on “intergenerational solidarity,” because we need people of every age to save the planet.

The good thing is that many younger climate activists are welcoming Baby Boomers with open arms.

Twenty-six-year-old Giselle Herzfeld, who works for 350.org in Colorado, has been a climate activist since her late teens. On the one hand, she says high school climate activists “are crushing it,” while on the other she notes that many of her mentors are older activists who were involved in the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements decades ago.

“As a younger activist, I know there is a lot I can learn from everyone around me,” she says. “There’s just a lot of wisdom and a lot of organizing insight that older people can bring to the new generation of climate activism. It’s going to take everybody from every generation working together.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Solution to Extinction Is You

Could California’s Next Dam Removal Take Place on This Endangered River?

Removing two aging Eel River dams known as the Potter Valley Project would benefit salmon, lamprey and people, but what happens next remains unclear.

This summer crews will break ground on the first of four dam removals along the Klamath River in California and Oregon. The dam-removal and river-restoration effort over the next two years is the largest of its kind, and river advocates hope more will follow.

They may not have to wait long. Up next in the region could be two dams on the mainstem of Northern California’s Eel River.

The Eel River is the third-largest river basin in the state and once had the largest runs of salmon and steelhead on the North Coast. Both Chinook and steelhead are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Citing this and other environmental and safety concerns, the river advocacy nonprofit American Rivers this week listed the Eel as one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the United States. It shares that distinction with the Colorado River, which faces threats from climate change and outdated management, and the Ohio River, which is at risk from toxic pollution.

The removal of Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam could help boost populations of Chinook and steelhead by providing access to hundreds of miles of prime, cold-water spawning and rearing habitat, acutely needed because climate change can push water temperatures above what’s tolerable for salmonids. The dams, known as the Potter Valley Project, belong to power company PG&E as part of a hydroelectric facility that also includes a transbasin diversion, which sends water through a 1-mile-long tunnel to the Russian River to irrigate fields in Potter Valley and provide water for downstream users in Sonoma County.

The small, 9.4-megawatt hydroelectric project has been economically unprofitable for years, and after PG&E found no willing buyers, it declined to renew its operating license in 2019. An equipment failure in the summer of 2022 stopped power production. A draft plan for surrender and decommissioning is expected at the end of the year. But it doesn’t guarantee either dam’s removal.

“Decommissioning can just mean locking the gates and walking away,” says Charlie Schneider, the Lost Coast project manager for California Trout. “Or it can mean full dam-facility removals.”

It can also include something in between, but Alicia Hamann, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, hopes the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, which oversees regulation of hydroelectric dams, will require full removal of the project.

“It would be highly unusual for FERC to allow PG&E to lock it up and walk away,” says Hamann. The project has risks not just to fish, but potential public safety hazards as well. Looming questions include whether all or some of the project would need to be removed and what would happen to the water diversion.

Fish on the Brink

Data suggests that the Eel River once teemed with salmonids, with estimated annual runs of more than 1 million salmon and steelhead, including some 800,000 Chinook. Now those fish populations are between 1% and 3% of their historic numbers.

Experts attribute the declines to a combination of pressures, including dams, logging, grazing, and the introduction of the Sacramento pikeminnow, a salmon predator.

A report from fisheries biologists at the U.C. Davis Center for Watershed Sciences found “that coho salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead are all on a trajectory towards extinction in the Eel River basin, with only winter steelhead being widely enough distributed and abundant enough to persist beyond the next 50 years.”

What role dams have played isn’t easy to calculate, but the 95-foot-tall Cape Horn Dam, constructed in 1908, has fish passage that experts consider outdated and inefficient.

“We know that the fish ladder isn’t effective at passing fish,” says Schneider, “so almost certainly some of them are getting to that concrete wall in the river and turning around and maybe spawning in more marginal habitats.”

The fish ladder fails to operate when the river has high flows, and it can clog with debris, forcing it to be temporarily shut down.

“There’s a structure at the base of the fish ladder called ‘the hotel’ where the fish enter and then get oriented and find the trigger flow to go the right direction up the fish ladder,” says Hamann. “And that entire structure can get completely inundated.”

There’s also no protection from predators, “which makes it like an all-you-can-eat buffet for otters,” she says.

If fish do clear the ladder, they then hit the 141-foot-tall Scott Dam 12 miles upstream. This is the end of the line. Scott Dam, which was erected in 1922, contains no fish passage and blocks about 288 miles of high-quality spawning and rearing habitat.

Small stream with rock. — Headwaters of the Eel River. Photo: CalTrout/Mike Wier

While that’s only about 10% of the whole watershed, it’s among the best areas for these fish.

“Based on our thermal and geomorphic habitat assessments, the blocked Upper Mainstem generally contains a higher proportion of suitable habitat for all freshwater salmonid life stages than much of the rest of the Eel River Basin,” found researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service and other institutions in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science in 2021.

That’s because of the gravelly sediment that’s ideal for spawning, the availability of food, and the temperature of the water.

“The habitat in the upper mainstem Eel River watershed provides cold-water refugia in tributaries over summertime for steelhead trout as well as ample spawning grounds for Chinook salmon and steelhead trout,” confirmed researchers of a study published in Northwest Science in 2020.

The colder water also can help protect them from invasive pike minnows, who Schneider says are better adapted to warmer conditions.

The population declines have been a loss for recreational and commercial fishers, as well as Tribes.

“We’re really in crisis mode,” says Adam Canter, natural resources director of the Wiyot Tribe, whose ancestral lands encompass the lower Eel River watershed. “The Tribe has lost a cultural and subsistence icon by not being able to fish for Chinook, coho and steelhead as they used to.”

Lamprey, whose numbers have also declined significantly, are a species of special concern in California — and are especially important for the Wiyot Tribe.

“Pacific lamprey are a really culturally important food for the Tribe,” says Canter. Settlers mistook the long, slender fish for eels and incorrectly gave the river its English name for them. Like Chinook and steelhead, lamprey historically used the habitat above Scott dam as well and would benefit from the increased habitat.

Shaky Ground

Declining fish numbers aren’t the only problem.

Friends of the Eel River also worries about seismic concerns at Scott Dam, which sits along a fault capable of producing a magnitude 7 earthquake. When engineers built the dam in the 1920s, they realized that the bedrock they were attempting to secure to part of the southern abutment was in fact a boulder that’s part of a very slow but active landslide.

“So they decided to just re-engineer the dam to go right in front of that giant moving boulder,” says Hamann. “We commissioned a study back in 2018 evaluating that landslide and trying to figure out how much of a risk that is to dam safety and reliability. Miller Pacific Engineering concluded for us that it is a quite serious concern and that PG&E should be evaluating the seismic risk in tandem with that landslide.”

Recent moves from the PG&E show that it’s aware of some seismic issues.

In spring the company usually closes spillway gates at the dam to increase the amount of water behind the dam during periods of high runoff. But this March PG&E announced that it wouldn’t close the gates.

“Keeping the spillway gates open at Scott Dam from this point forward allows us to reduce potential risk around seismic performance,” the company said in a press release. “New information and updated analyses suggest the level of risk around seismic performance at Scott Dam is greater than the previous evaluation.”

Basin Water Issues

If the dams are removed, it remains unclear how authorities will resolve the issue of the transbasin water diversion.

As it is now, “The Russian River gets all the benefits from this project. The Eel gets all the impacts. How is that fair?” says Schneider.

Aerial view of dam with fish ladder. — The Cape Horn Dam and fish ladder on the Eel River. Photo: CalTrout/Kyle Schwartz

A few years ago a group of stakeholders from the Eel and Russian river watersheds, who called themselves the Two Basin Solution Partnership, tried to find a way to improve conditions in the Eel while maintaining the water diversion to the Russian River. The group had hoped to purchase the project, remove Scott Dam, and continue a diversion with less ecological harm.

“Unfortunately, they just weren’t able to come up with the necessary funding to complete the studies needed for that process,” says Hamann.

There may be other options to remove both dams while continuing to divert some amount of water. But that’s not popular with everyone, including the Wiyot.

“The Tribe wants to see the dams come down and the water diversion no longer used,” says Canter. “The Tribe really just wants to see the river back to its natural state. All that cold water being diverted hurts not just fish but also contributes to increased water temperatures, which then promotes toxic algal blooms and other diseases that can be bad for humans, pets, fish — everyone alike.”

He says the Tribe would support efforts to replace that lost water by investing in more water storage and conservation in the Russian River. “The Tribe certainly doesn’t want them high and dry,” he says. “We have to acknowledge that they’ve been in that water regime for over 100 years now, but it’s come with a big cost.”

Before dam removal could happen, though, there are a lot of other steps.

PG&E will submit its draft plan for decommissioning to FERC at the end of this year, and then there’ll be stakeholder outreach, consultations and public comments, with the final plan due in 2025.

“The state is going to have to issue a clean water certification,” says Hamann. “The water boards are probably going to have to get involved when it comes to straightening out water rights and what happens to those with the end of this project. If we all moved really quickly and all the bureaucratic ducks were lined up and fell just right, we could see those dams out of there by 2030.”

That, she says, is the most optimistic timeline.

For the Wiyot, it would be the best scenario.

“By restoring the river back to health and removing the dams, it would not only be restoring our animal and plant relatives that are associated with the river,” says Canter. “But also our culture and our human health as well.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Klamath Countdown: Researchers Hustle Before Largest Dam-Removal Project Begins

An Unconventional Workshop

Cutting the Green Tape

The Human Dimension

Next Steps

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Implausible Heat Is Everywhere

Some Places Have Got Lucky — So Far

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How You Can Help: Official Guidance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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Species name:

Description:

Where it’s found:

IUCN Red List status:

Major threats:

Notable conservation programs:

My favorite experience:

What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?

Further reading:

Choosing Which Corals to Move Where

Going the Distance

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Multiplying Cheetahs

Counting Tigers

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Win-Win Activism

Generational Divide

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Fish on the Brink

Shaky Ground

Basin Water Issues

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