Wolf recovery in California still fragile amid efforts to restore population
Why it matters: Wolves restore ecosystem balance by keeping deer and elk populations under control, preventing "overbrowsing" — excessive plant consumption by herbivores — and allowing vegetation to rebound.
State of play: Recovery remains fragile. Small pack numbers, high pup losses, limited breeding pairs, low prey availability and threats from disease and habitat change can all slow their rebound.
What they're saying:"It's concerning that there's no indication the other seven packs have had pups," said Amaroq Weiss, a senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. "For recovery to stay on track there needs to be more wolves in more places."
By the numbers: 22 pups in California were born among three packs this year, per an Aug. 11 quarterly report from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Between the lines: Some packs likely didn't breed because their alpha male and female are siblings. Other packs, which had recently bred in previous years, may have had pups the state hasn't confirmed yet, Weiss told Axios.
A total of 50 to 70 wolves live in California, fluctuations that vary widely because pup mortality rates tend to be high — often 50% or more in the first year — due to various natural and environmental factors, she added.
Zoom in: Most of the state's wolves roam in and around Lassen National Forest in the northeast, but their range stretches from the Oregon border to Sequoia National Forest in the south.
Zoom out: Elsewhere in the West, there are about 1,800 wolves in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho combined; roughly 200 each in Washington and Oregon; around 280 in Arizona and New Mexico combined; and about 10 in Colorado, per Weiss.
Catch up quick: Gray wolves were wiped out in California by the 1920s amid a nationwide extermination campaign. Repopulation efforts began in 2011, when OR-7 — the first wolf identified in California in nearly a century — crossed in from Oregon.
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Axios
19 hours ago
- Axios
Wolf recovery in California still fragile amid efforts to restore population
Only three of California's 10 active wolf packs had pups this year, per new state data. Why it matters: Wolves restore ecosystem balance by keeping deer and elk populations under control, preventing "overbrowsing" — excessive plant consumption by herbivores — and allowing vegetation to rebound. State of play: Recovery remains fragile. Small pack numbers, high pup losses, limited breeding pairs, low prey availability and threats from disease and habitat change can all slow their rebound. What they're saying:"It's concerning that there's no indication the other seven packs have had pups," said Amaroq Weiss, a senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. "For recovery to stay on track there needs to be more wolves in more places." By the numbers: 22 pups in California were born among three packs this year, per an Aug. 11 quarterly report from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Between the lines: Some packs likely didn't breed because their alpha male and female are siblings. Other packs, which had recently bred in previous years, may have had pups the state hasn't confirmed yet, Weiss told Axios. A total of 50 to 70 wolves live in California, fluctuations that vary widely because pup mortality rates tend to be high — often 50% or more in the first year — due to various natural and environmental factors, she added. Zoom in: Most of the state's wolves roam in and around Lassen National Forest in the northeast, but their range stretches from the Oregon border to Sequoia National Forest in the south. Zoom out: Elsewhere in the West, there are about 1,800 wolves in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho combined; roughly 200 each in Washington and Oregon; around 280 in Arizona and New Mexico combined; and about 10 in Colorado, per Weiss. Catch up quick: Gray wolves were wiped out in California by the 1920s amid a nationwide extermination campaign. Repopulation efforts began in 2011, when OR-7 — the first wolf identified in California in nearly a century — crossed in from Oregon.
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California's newest invaders are beautiful swans. Should hunters kill them?
On an early August morning, it didn't take long to spot the first pair of huge white swans with orange and black bills and graceful, curving necks as they swam in the marsh along the side of a Solano County levee road. They dabbled in the vegetation as a pickup drove through the Grizzly Island Wildlife Area. A short drive later, past a herd of a dozen tule elk, two more swans appeared in the marsh alongside the dirt road. Then four more. A few hundred yards down the road, out in the distance past a thicket of swaying reeds, dozens of swans swam in the water. For casual bird watchers, the sight of all these majestic animals might be a pleasure and bring to mind swan-themed works of literature, such as 'Leda and the Swan' and 'The Ugly Duckling.' But for wetland biologists and others with a stake in the health of the surrounding Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast, the birds represent the latest — and an exponentially growing — threat to the few remaining wetlands left in California. These are mute swans, native to Europe and Asia. Weighing up to 30 pounds and with a wingspan of up to eight feet, they're the biggest bird in the marsh, and they're not the least bit shy about throwing their weight around. Fiercely territorial, especially during breeding season, they've been known to drown smaller animals and have killed at least one American kayaker. They've displaced colonies of nesting native birds in other parts of the U.S. they have invaded. Mute swans also feed gluttonously on submerged vegetation, destroying the plant life on which other native wetland species depend. 'They might be a pretty, big, white bird … and they may be charismatic, but they can be pretty nasty,' said Brad Bortner, a retired chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's migratory bird management programs in Washington D.C. In 2008, California banned anyone without a special permit from keeping mute swans as pets or from importing them into the state. The hope was to head off yet another destructive invasive species taking hold in the state. It didn't work. The mute swan population exploded in just a few years. In 2022, state waterfowl biologists estimated there were 1,500 of them. This spring, they estimated more than 12,000, nearly double the year before. Most of the mute swans are in the Suisun Marsh, a sprawling complex of public wetlands, agricultural lands and private duck-hunting clubs on the outskirts of the Bay Area near Fairfield. 'We keep watching them climb and climb and climb,' said Melanie Weaver, waterfowl coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. A measure before the state Legislature aims to allow hunters and landowners to shoot the swans for the next five years to try to bring their numbers down to more manageable levels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and beyond. The hunting groups supporting Assembly Bill 764 essentially ask: If Californians are OK with spending more than $13 million since 2018 to kill nearly 6,000 nutria, the 20-pound, orange-toothed South American rodents that have invaded the same waterways, why not let hunters and land owners do the same to mute swans — but for free? 'If the population gets too large and out of control, it may be beyond our ability then to really effectively manage them,' Mark Hennelly, a lobbyist for the California Waterfowl Association, told the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee this spring. 'So we want to get ahead of the problem.' Animal welfare groups object That argument has so far been a surprisingly easy sell in the Legislature, despite California's passionate and influential anti-hunting activists. Similar swan-killing proposals have led to protests in other states. The measure easily passed the Assembly without any lawmaker voting against it. It's now pending in the California Senate. No group has opposed the measure so far, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database, but that might soon change. Mute swans, unlike nutria, have a dedicated group of supporters, mostly on the East Coast. Nicole Rivard, a spokesperson for Friends of Animals, said she and fellow members of the animal welfare organization believe mute swans shouldn't be treated like vermin. The birds arrived here through no fault of their own, brought by humans, and they don't deserve to be killed for it, she said. Rivard believes the California legislation is motivated by hunters looking for an excuse to have yet another bird to legally shoot. Currently, mute swans can only be killed by landowners if the birds 'are found to be injuring growing crops or property,' according to state regulations. 'We're anti-hunting, so we don't like the idea that (hunting) might be, you know, part of the reasoning behind this,' Rivard said. Arguing that claims of mute swans' environmental damage and aggression are overblown, Friends of Animals and other groups opposed killing them decades ago, after Mid-Atlantic states proposed eradication when their populations began expanding dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s. The groups protested, filed lawsuits and proposed legislation to try to stop the killing. They had mixed success. Some states began killing the nonnative swans over the animal welfare groups' objections. Notably, Maryland was able to knock the mute swan population down from around 5,000 birds in the early 2000s to around 200 by 2010. 'Continued control and maintenance operations have reduced that number to just a handful of birds today,' said Josh Homyack, the game bird section leader for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. In Maryland, government agency employees raided mute swan nests and destroyed eggs, captured and euthanized swans when they were flightless during their feather-molting season and shot them in carefully coordinated operations, Homyack said. The state also issued a few permits to kill the birds to local landowners. In New York, the mute swan lobby got a law passed that made it harder to kill the birds, requiring state officials to 'fully exhaust non-lethal control measures' such as nest destruction and capturing birds and moving them to wildlife facilities ' prior to any lethal removal.' The mute swan population in New York has stayed steady at around 2,000 to 3,400 birds. Charisma matters with invasive species On the East Coast, mute swans have been around since before the turn of the last century. They were first imported as ornamental livestock for zoos, parks and estates. Some of California's mute swans likely came in the same way. Weaver, the California waterfowl coordinator, said others were likely brought in the past few years to chase away Canada geese that have increasingly become a nuisance at parks and golf courses. 'People were buying these (swans), and they were just throwing them out there,' she said. Weaver noted their owners didn't do the responsible thing and clip their wings to keep them from flying off. That's hardly surprising. It's no easy task to grab a hissing 25-pound swan, big and angry enough to swamp a kayaker. So with nothing to stop them, the birds flew to nearby marshlands and began reproducing. 'Here we are, not very many years down the road, with a population that is really increasing at a rapid rate,' Weaver said. So far, California's wildlife agency hasn't enacted a mute swan eradication plan similar to the one it started almost immediately — and publicly promoted — a few years ago, after nutria first started turning up in the San Joaquin Valley. Nutria are similarly destructive feeders on aquatic plants. The South American swamp rodents also burrow holes in levees, posing a threat to the state's flood-control and water-supply infrastructure. Dave Strayer, a retired invasive species expert with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, said he's not surprised state officials haven't been as aggressive with the beautiful mute swans, given the uproar over killing them in other states. He said research has shown that when it comes to invasive animals, charisma matters. The more attractive a problematic non-native species is, the less appetite there is to wipe it out. Stayer gave an example: Few complain about killing common nonnative rats, but you're apt to get death threats at even the suggestion of wiping out ecologically harmful feral cat colonies in the same habitats. He noted that no one has ever complained about efforts to eradicate one of his research subjects, the nonnative zebra mussels that have also invaded California. 'I never had even one person stand up for zebra mussels and say, 'No, these are beautiful, elegant God's creatures' and so forth,' he said. Few wetlands and too many mute swans Supporters of the swan-killing legislation say reducing the number of mute swans should be fairly easy since the giant white birds are easy to spot, identify and kill. Their size and the color and shape of their bills also reduce the risk they'll be confused with other protected bird species, they say. California's native tundra and trumpeter swans would still be protected and illegal to shoot if the bill becomes law. Despite their undeniable beauty, Weaver, the state waterfowl coordinator, sees mute swans similarly to nutria. The swans pose too great a threat to native species reliant on the few wetlands left in California, which has lost at least 90% of the habitats to agriculture and urban sprawl. 'They don't move around the state all that much, and they really like the Delta-Suisun Marsh area, so it's still easy to handle the issue,' Weaver said. 'The longer we wait, it won't be.'
Axios
5 days ago
- Axios
Complaints about Des Moines' stink sink
The number of odor complaints in Des Moines plummeted in the first half of this year since the city installed more scientific odor detectors, data obtained by Axios through a public records request shows. Why it matters: Des Moines is believed to be the first U.S. city to use such a system, which could serve as a model for other municipalities looking to improve quality of life for their residents. Catch up quick: DSM has struggled with foul odors for decades, often linked to animal processing facilities near downtown. A study commissioned by the city in 2021 identified three "significant odor generators" — Darling Ingredients rendering plant, Pine Ridge Farms pork packing plant and Wiechman Pig Company, a swine buying station. The businesses agreed to work with the city, and in October 2023, DSM installed scientific monitors near the processing plants to alert about spikes in chemical compounds that commonly cause foul odors. State of play: The city has been refining or expanding its "eNose" system in recent months, with the Council approving more monitors late last year. Environmental or health executives from several of the companies told City Council members during an October meeting that they were also making more improvements at their sites. Driving the news: Complaints dropped by over 50%, from 182 in the first half of 2024 to 90 this year, according to city data. The number of days the city defines as "critical" with five or more complaints dropped from 10 to 1 during that same period. Yes, but: More data is needed for a comprehensive assessment. Complaints have traditionally been more common in summer and fall months when seasonal wind patterns direct odors to more populated areas of the city, Dalton Jacobus, Des Moines' neighborhood inspections administrator, told the council at the October meeting. The intrigue: Complaints were lower between 2020 and 2022 because of the pandemic when fewer workers were downtown, Jacobus told the council. Aside from those years, there have been at least 245 complaints each year since 2016.
