Wildlife officials in the US on Thursday declared Canada lynx recovered and said the snow-loving wild cats no longer need special protections following steps to preserve their habitat.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said it would begin drafting a rule to revoke the lynx’s threatened listing across the Lower 48 state under the Endangered Species Act.
Wildlife advocates said they would challenge the move in court.
Photo: AP
First imposed in 2000, the threatened designation has interrupted numerous logging and road building projects on federal lands, frustrating industry groups and Western lawmakers.
Some scientists and wildlife advocates have warned that climate change could reduce lynx habitat and the availability of its primary food source — snowshoe hares.
Thursday’s decision came after government biologists shortened their time span for considering climate change threats, from 2100 to 2050, because of what they said were uncertainties in long-term climate models.
An assessment by US government biologists based on that shorter time span concluded lynx populations remain resilient and even have increased versus historical levels in parts of Colorado and Maine.
Canada lynx are about the size of bobcats, but with huge paws to help them navigate deep snow. The animals also are found in Montana, Minnesota, Idaho and Washington state.
There is no reliable estimate of their population, leaving officials to rely on information about habitat and hare populations to gauge the species’ status.
“Based on what we know, we think the habitat has improved, protections around the habitat have improved and therefore lynx populations have improved,” said Jodi Bush, US Fish and Wildlife field supervisor in Montana.
In Maine, easements protecting more than 809, 400 hectares of forest have benefited lynx, officials said.
In Western states, the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management adopted land management plans providing similar benefits, they said.
Under an earlier assessment of lynx, published in December 2016, US government biologists predicted some populations would disappear by 2100. That was based on models predicting widespread and substantial changes to the animals’ snowy habitat due to climate change.
Bush said those models turned out to be too uncertain to justify using them as a basis for whether lynx are recovered.
A similar conclusion was reached by the agency in 2014 for another snow-loving creature — the North American wolverine. In that case, a US federal judge overruled the US government’s decision not to give wolverines protections, saying the animal was “squarely in the path of climate change.”
Wildlife advocates said this announcement was similarly flawed.
“The earlier finding was that lynx remain in danger and are likely to be exterminated by the end of the century. Since that’s the best science, then we need to follow that,” Western Environmental Law Center staff attorney Matthew Bishop said.
Two Republican lawmakers from Montana — US Representative Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines — said they welcomed the move toward lifting protections.
Daines said the recovery would result in better management of public forests and reflected years of collaboration between states, tribes, conservation groups, hunters and others.
No time line has been set for when lynx protections could be lifted, Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Jennifer Strickland said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS