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Researcher Laurenne Schiller was walking with her partner in a Nova Scotia park a few years ago when the pair spotted a peregrine falcon. Isn’t it amazing, one of them commented, that the birds are still here?
Almost 50 years ago, scientists declared the raptor an endangered species in Canada. But peregrine falcons didn’t go the way of the dodo. Not only are they still around, their numbers have increased.
The peregrine falcon is one of the most well-known conservation success stories in North America, Schiller, a marine conservation scientist and post doctoral researcher with Carleton and Dalhousie universities, said in an interview. Her encounter with the bird in Nova Scotia left her wondering about other potential conservation success stories in Canada.
In the midst of the global biodiversity crisis, with scientists warning as many as a million species are in danger of extinction, conservation work can be filled with disappointment. So when Schiller pitched a study looking into species recovery to a few of her research colleagues across the country, “a lot of people were excited,” Mathilde Tissier, an adjunct professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal and study co-author, said in an interview.
There are relatively few species recovery success stories in Canada, especially when stacked against the 5,000 species at some risk of extinction across the country today. But as Schiller and her co-authors found, we have something to learn from species like the peregrine falcon that have defied the odds and recovered from dire situations.
In a new study published this week in the journal FACETS, Schiller and her colleagues examine 36 species — from mammals and birds to arthropods and lichens — initially assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada between 1978 and 1999. Only eight species, including peregrine falcons, are doing better today than when they were first assessed.
Peregrine falcons were devastated by DDT, a pesticide widely used from the 1940s to the 1970s that caused egg shells to thin, impeding reproduction. A subspecies of peregrine falcon that breeds along B.C.’s coast remains of special concern under the federal Species At Risk Act, but populations of the peregrine falcon subspecies that breeds across Canada have grown so much the falcon is no longer considered at risk.
The key factor in the falcon’s recovery was a ban on the use of DDT in the 1970s, the researchers note.
Schiller and her colleagues also looked at species the committee assessed at least twice between 2000 and 2019. More than 400 species met their criteria. Again, only eight, including a couple from the first group they examined, were more abundant and had a lower risk of extinction, the researchers found.
Sea otters, humpback whales and wood bison are among the species the researchers identified as success stories. All three species declined significantly due to over harvesting, before restrictions set the stage for their recoveries.
“When looking across all the species in our study, we found that the most common attribute of successes was intervention that sufficiently addressed the primary cause of decline for that species,” Schiller explained.
How much money was invested in recovery efforts or how many people were working on them didn’t seem to matter much, if the main reason for a species’ decline wasn’t addressed, she explained.
“In all cases, the most important first step was to stop doing something harmful before starting recovery interventions,” the paper explains, using italics for emphasis.
The research team also looked at 55 species that had decreased in numbers and had a higher risk of extinction than when they were first assessed by the committee.
Schiller and her colleagues chose eight of these “setback” species to compare against their eight successes.
“When we look at species that are more in the setback category, that are not recovering the way the successes are, we find that largely it is related to habitat loss and degradation,” Schiller said.
“The best example there — and this one was a real gut punch for me actually — was the St. Lawrence beluga.”
Intensive hunting led to dramatic declines in the St. Lawrence Estuary beluga whale population during the first half of the 1900s. In 1932, the Quebec government, worried belugas were competition for cod fishers, began offering $15 for every beluga killed. The provincial government paid more than 2,000 bounties by 1938, before the program ended the following year.
While hunting belugas was banned in the 1970s, the whales haven’t recovered. Today, the population is threatened by habitat degradation, the paper notes.
In 1998, a marine park was established to help protect the belugas, but Schiller said lines on a map aren’t enough to keep out threats such as noise and chemical pollution.
“When you have a species that has such a confined range, and it’s in one of the busiest and most polluted waterways in North America, it’s going to be really, really hard to address that decline comprehensively,” she pointed out.
For many success stories, the authors note the original cause of the species’ decline “was tangible, and could be addressed through a singular targeted measure.”
In contrast, they found many wildlife populations are now under pressure from a combination of human impacts, which can make it more challenging to address the reasons for their decline.
The authors underscore the need for provinces to help protect species at risk with new or stronger laws and regulations. They also urge municipalities to find ways to meet the needs of their growing populations without further encroaching on natural habitats. And they call for stronger legislation and on-the-ground measures to address key threats, such as habitat degradation and loss.
While many species are facing more complex, layered threats today than in the past, Tissier said there are still examples in Canada where a direct threat to a species isn’t being adequately addressed, even as resources are being invested in other conservation measures.
“We have cases where we know the main threat — like for many insects, it’s pesticides — but we are still recreating habitat or doing things without targeting this main threat, and as we see, it may be pointless if you don’t remove the threat,” Tissier said.
Chris Johnson, a professor of landscape conservation at the University of Northern British Columbia and a longtime member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, said the study is consistent with previous research.
“It’s not a great report card for biodiversity conservation in Canada,” he said.
Johnson cautioned a species’ status may sometimes change with a new assessment because of new data or a change in rules. But at the same time, if the federal Species At Risk Act were working as intended, wildlife populations should be improving, not staying the same or getting worse, he said.
“If we’re not having those ‘mission accomplished’ moments with these little bits of biodiversity in Canada, then I think we should be concerned,” he said.
“It is going to get trickier over time, especially with a lot of the unknowns that are coming with climate change,” he said. “We’re going to need multiple strategies to help conserve biodiversity in that complex context.”
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