Health and environmental agencies are struggling to find the best way to alert people, particularly women, about the risks of eating too much sport fish contaminated with toxic chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
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Health and environmental agencies are struggling to find the best way to alert people,
particularly women, about the risks of eating too much sport fish contaminated with
toxic chemicals. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Some states cut budgets, including money for publishing fish consumption advisories.
It’s curtailing the efforts of health officials to tell families that children and women of
childbearing age should severely restrict their intake of sport fish.
Most sport fish contain levels of pesticides, PCBs, and/or mercury high enough to
cause neurological and mental developmental problems in children. Barbara Knuth
is a professor at Cornell University.
“Budgets are limited and until the time when resources are made available through state
governments, through EPA, even through foundations to fund both communication efforts and
evaluation and testing of those efforts to improve them, I think it’s still going to be a struggling
effort.”
Knuth says relatively small investments in information now could prevent great costs to
society and children’s lives later.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Lake Erie water snake is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is developing a recovery plan for the snake – and people who live near the snake are also giving it a hand in recovery. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Many people are afraid of snakes. But along the shores of Lake Erie, residents are working to keep a threatened water snake in the neighborhood. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
Many people are afraid of snakes. But along the shores of Lake Erie, residents are working to
keep a threatened water snake in the neighborhood. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Rebecca Williams has more:
The Lake Erie water snake was listed as threatened three years ago. The snakes are found only
on rocky limestone islands in the western basin. And they can grow up to five feet long.
Their numbers have dropped recently because people are building houses on their shoreline
habitat. And in the past, people have killed the snakes out of fear.
Megan Seymour is a wildlife biologist. She works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
She says, over time, most people have stopped harassing the snakes. Some
landowners have even posted signs saying, “Water snakes welcome here.”
“I think the best tactic for me has been to kind of explain the biology of the snakes, explain how
they have their own personalities, sort of… The more people learn about the snakes, the more
interested they become, and the more they start seeing it as some kind of interesting animal
versus a gross snake.”
Seymour is writing the recovery plan for the snakes. She says most wildlife recoveries take many
years, but because the locals are showing concern, she thinks the snakes will recover more
quickly.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.
Each fall, thousands of hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey fly hundreds of miles in search of warmer climates. And between August and December, nearly 70-thousand people will climb to the top of a bird sanctuary called Hawk Mountain to get a closer look at those birds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
Transcript
Each fall, about thousands of hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey fly hundreds of miles
in search of warmer climates. And between August and December, nearly 70-thousand
people will climb to the top of a bird sanctuary called Hawk Mountain to get a closer
look at those birds. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
“Those of you haven’t found the osprey, it’s over there at owl’s head, naked eye here to
the right.”
On a clear day, the view from atop Hawk Mountain stretches for more than fifty miles.
But on this particularly hazy Saturday afternoon, bird-watchers are pushing their
binoculars and telescopes to the limits.
“Well, we’re making them out there, they’re coming in. It’s like you just gotta wait ’til
they get a little closer than what they typically do. They’ve been popping out of clouds
and haze all day for us.”
Doug Wood is a volunteer at Hawk Mountain in Eastern Pennsylvania. This afternoon,
he’s the official bird counter.
“We’re basically taking a lot of field information. Wind, weather, temperature, cloud
cover, wind direction. And then we’re basically monitoring the birds’ species, age, sex,
and recording it every hour.
“Look! An Osprey! And then fade to scene change.”
Researchers at Hawk Mountain have been keeping records of osprey and other migratory
raptors for more than seventy years, making it the oldest monitoring station in the world.
In the early twentieth century, hunters would shoot thousands of birds from the
mountainside each year. Today, people travel from all over the world to shoot birds with
their cameras.
Matt Wong came all the way from New Zealand to study at the sanctuary.
“Hawk Mountain is internationally renowned as a hawk watch site. And also a place
where big research actually happens. Now, not many of the locals around Pennsylvania
actually realize this, but it’s actually huge on the international scene. It’s world
recognized, and that’s one of the reasons why I came here.”
In Wong’s country, there are only two species of raptors. In America, he’s had a chance
to study dozens of varieties.
But even with so many different species populating North America, many people still
think of them as strangers or sometimes even as monsters.
“I still get, amazingly to me, a lot of people that think that these birds are out to get us.”
Volunteer Bob Owens has spent the last 20 years doing education programs at Hawk
Mountain.
“If you intrude into their territory when they have young in the nest, or something like
that, yeah, they’re probably going to chase you. As far as them killing babies and taking
them from baby carriages, this is all old wives tales. This just does not happen.”
Owens runs a small farm for a living, where he says hawks and barn owls help keep
rodents under control. But in a larger sense, Owens says there’s a lot people can learn
from these birds.
“Any three and a half pound bird that can apply four hundred pounds of pressure with its
talons is built to do what they’re doing. They are at the top of the food chain. And that’s
the other big thing that it shows us. It just opens up a door here as to all the reasons the
birds are either dropping or rising in population. What are we doing?”
Owens says in the seventy years researchers at Hawk Mountain have been counting birds,
they’ve seen populations rise and fall. Hawks and eagles are hardy birds. But even the
most successful predators can fall victim to environmental change.
Keith Bildstein is the sanctuary’s director of conservation programs. He says raptors are
like sensitive tools, telling researchers when something’s wrong with an ecosystem.
“Birds of prey are excellent biological indicators. In the middle of the last century they
told us that we were having a problem with our misuse of organochlorine pesticides,
specifically DDT. Today, they’re leading us in explorations of the spread of West Nile
Virus.”
Bildstein says because raptors are at the top of the food chain, when their numbers fall
it’s a pretty good sign that their food source is dwindling, their habitat could be
disappearing, or air quality might be suffering.
But for most of Hawk Mountain’s visitors, the birds are more than barometers of a
healthy ecosystem. According to birder Judy Higgs, they’re beautiful creatures,
especially when viewed from a great height.
“These birds are just majestic. And the other thing is that they go so far. You know,
some of these birds are going to South America!”
Higgs first climbed the mountain in 1970, when she was a student at nearby Kutztown
University. Before moving out of state, Higgs used to come to Hawk Mountain daily…
she stills visits on weekends whenever she can.
“I used to do work in the morning, come here in the afternoon, go home, and finish my
work at night so I could be here.”
By day’s end, Higgs and her fellow birdwatchers count more than 600 raptors. During
the fall season, as many as 70-thousand predatory birds, from vultures to falcons might
pass by on their way to distant points.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Brad Linder.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering expanding canals, channels, harbors, and locks to make way for larger ocean-going ships to enter the Great Lakes. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports, not everyone thinks that’s such a good idea:
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering expanding canals, channels, harbors and locks to make way for larger ocean-going ships to enter the Great Lakes, but as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… not everyone thinks that’s such a good idea:
An Army Corps of Engineers’ draft report indicates the Corps wants to determine the feasibility of dredging and widening connecting channels to allow ships that are 250 feet longer and 30 feet wider than the biggest ship entering the Great Lakes today. Jennifer Nalbone is with Great Lakes United, a U.S. and Canadian consortium of environmental and other groups. She says there are lots of concerns. They include the disruption to the environment that the expansions would require, and concerns about larger foreign ships bringing more exotic invasive species into the Great Lakes.
“All of these environmental problems that we’re seeing in the basin could be amplified quite significantly if we allow larger foreign ships to gain access to the basin.”
Expansions at every connecting channel between the Great Lakes are being considered.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Asian longhorned beetle, native to China, is a serious threat to hardwood trees in the U.S. So far, populations of the beetle have been confined to Chicago and New York. Foresters are concerned that more non-native species will be introduced through expanded global trade. Photo courtesy of USDA-APHIS.
Forests in the Midwest may be under siege from exotic species more often in the future… partly because of international trade. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explains:
Transcript
Forests in the Midwest may be under siege from exotic species more often in the future… partly because of international trade. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports:
The Asian longhorned beetle is native to China.
The beetle caught a ride to the U.S. in the wooden packing material of
imported goods. So far, the beetle has been found in New York and
Chicago.
Once a tree is infested with beetles, the best way to stop the beetles from spreading is to destroy the tree.
A National Academy of Sciences study predicts that threats to native species will increase as trade opens up between the U.S. and China. The authors say that China may become a new “donor region” for species that could become invasive.
Entomologist Deborah McCullough is an author of the study.
“You can kind of visualize this whole complex of insects and weeds and plant pathogens in Asia that haven’t had a pathway, they haven’t had a route to be brought to the country yet… and we really don’t know what all could end up coming in.”
Dr. McCullough says because China’s range of climates and plant life are similar to that of the U.S., many species that make it over here have a chance to become established.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.
More than 1,300 U.S. and Canadian scientists are asking the Canadian government to strengthen proposed legislation that would protect endangered species. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly explains:
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More than 13 hundred U.S. and Canadian scientists are asking the Canadian government to strengthen proposed legislation that would protect endangered species. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports.
Right now, endangered species in Canada have no federal protection. The new Species at Risk Act would make it illegal for people to kill the 3 hundred 80 plants and animals considered at risk. But unlike the American law, the proposal does not guarantee that the land or waters in which these animals live will be protected from development. University of Ottawa biology professor David Currie says that’s led to a protest among scientists.
“Virtually all of the studies that have been done on the reasons why species become endangered or go extinct have shown that at least some aspect of habitat loss is involved and in many of the most dramatic cases of extinction, species’ habitats have been simply been entirely wiped out.”
The government’s environment committee will consider amendments to the bill in October. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.
Next month, Kirtland’s Warblers will begin their yearly winter trek. They’ll be flying more than eleven hundred miles from their only known nesting ground in Michigan to their wintering grounds in the Caribbean Islands. The bird was one of the first species to be listed as endangered in 1973. But thanks to several decades worth of forest and wildlife management, the bird’s numbers are increasing. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
Ten whooping crane chicks that may go on a historic flight through part of the Midwest this fall are about to start flying lessons. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
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Ten whooping crane chicks that may go on a historic flight through part of the Midwest this fall are about to start flying lessons. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports.
Public and private sector wildlife experts are trying to set up the first migrating flock of whooping cranes in the Eastern U.S. the plan is to have the birds learn their migration route this October by following ultra-light aircraft from Wisconsin to Florida. Ten two-month old whooping crane chicks have just finished the first step of the experiment at a federal wildlife center in Maryland. Joan Guilfoyle of the u-s fish and wildlife service says the chicks went through ground school.
“Right from coming out of the egg they were exposed to sounds of ultra light engines, being able to see people in costumes disguised as adult whoopers, so they would begin to associate their care and protection with those two things.”
Now the crane chicks have been brought by private plane to
Wisconsin, where ultra light pilots wearing crane costumes will give the birds flying lessons. Many of the same people worked on a test migration with smaller but more plentiful sandhill cranes last year. Guilfoyle says there are some behavioral differences between sandhills and whoopers.
“One of them is sandhills tend to migrate in groups more than whoopers…so we will learn the right number to group…may be all ten of them together or they may end up in two groups.”
A century ago, it’s believed about one thousand whooping cranes roamed parts of North America. Today, the species is endangered. The only remaining migrating flock of whoopers numbers about one hundred and seventy five. That flock spends its summers in Canada, before heading to Texas for the winter. If the human-assisted migration in Wisconsin is successful this fall, scientists hope to continue the reintroduction. And they say they could have as many as 25 breeding pairs of whooping cranes living in the Wisconsin to Florida flock within the next ten years.” For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.
People often associate Canada with wildlife. Beavers, moose and grizzly
bears are among the better-known residents. So it may come as a
surprise that endangered species are not federally protected. The
Canadian government is hoping to change that with a new bill called the
Species at Risk Act. But environmentalists say the plan is too weak.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
States in the Mississippi river basin are protesting a decision by the state of Mississippi to allow a foreign fish to be introduced tocontrol a pest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… the other states are concerned the fish will escape into the wild and damage the environment:
Transcript
States in the Mississippi River Basin are protesting a decision by the state of Mississippi to
allow a foreign fish to be introduced to control a pest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester
Graham reports the other states are concerned the fish will escape into the wild and damage the
environment:
If you buy a package of catfish filets at the supermarket or order blackened catfish at your
favorite restaurant, chances are that fish was raised in a farm pond in Mississippi. The state of
Mississippi supplies almost three-fourths of the world’s commercial catfish. It’s a two-billion
dollar a year business, coming in only after cotton and timber as one of Mississippi’s largest
industries.
In recent years, Mississippi farmers have been struggling with a parasite that’s attacking the
catfish. Jimmy Avery is a researcher with the National Warmwater Aquaculture Center at Mississippi
State University. He says the parasite is causing quite a bit of damage.
“It’s either killing these fish outright or it’s stressing them to the point they no longer grow.”
Avery says the parasite makes its home in snails. To get rid of the snails, the Mississippi
Department of Agriculture and commerce has approved introducing an Asian fish called the black
carp. The black carp eats snails and mussels. But, other states are worried that the black carp
will escape the farm ponds and get into the wild. Avery says that’s not likely…
“The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce has decided that through the permit
process, we can minimize this. They’ll know where every black carp is located. They’ll know what
kinds of system they’ve been put in and it felt like that those regulations that had been put in
place are strong enough to prevent that.”
But the State of Missisippi’s assurances don’t convince others. Roger Klosek is the Director of
Conservation at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He studies native mussels.
“If black carp are used to deal with the snail problem, eventually they’ll escape into the main
waterways, and start reproducing. And once they do that, they’ll start feeding on the native
mussel fauna which is one of the last remaining native mussel faunas in the United States and
literally wipe it out.”
Klosek says native mussel populations have already been hurt by another exotic species, the zebra
mussel. He believes the black carp would be the last straw for American freshwater mussels.
“So, somebody’s going to lose and it’s probably better – I know the catfish farmers will hate me
for saying this, but – it’s probably better that they lose a little economically rather than
reduce some of the native fauna to an irretrievable state.”
Some states’ officials agree with Klosek. Bill Bertrand works with the Illinois Department of
Natural Resources fisheries office. He says there’s a history of Asian carp getting loose. The
silver carp, the bighead carp, and the grass carp have already escaped from farm ponds, mostly
from Arkansas where there are few regulations.
“There’s a history of these exotics, imports, escaping into the river system, spreading throughout
the entire river basin system and causing impacts on all the other states in the system. And
Mississippi appears to tend to ignore that fact and go ahead their own merry way, saying ‘Well
we’re doing this because we want to do it and it’s beneficial to us.'”
Bertrand says governors of some of the states along the Mississippi River have sent letters to the
Governor of the State of Mississippi, asking him to stop the use of black carp. Several of the
states intend to ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban the importation of the fish. The
federal agency has not yet received that request… but even if the Fish and Wildlife service
found a ban was appropriate, it would take several months to go through the process. Even then, a
ban would not apply to black carp already in the U.S.
Mike Oetker is a fisheries biologist with the Fish and Wildlife service. He says the agency is
trying to play the role of mediator.
“Right now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to work with states and the industry to
try to prevent the problem of the possible release or accidental release of black carp into the
environment. There are several alternatives to black carp where we can use native fish such as the
red ear sunfish or freshwater drum or even big mouth buffalo to do the same type of biological
control that the black carp are doing. And that would give of the ability to kind of circumvent
this problem.”
The catfish farmers in the State of Mississippi say the native fish don’t eat the snails as
quickly as the black carp. The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce says it will ask
farmers to use chemical treatments first and where native fish will work, they’ll try to use them.
but in the end, the Mississippi agency says it will allow catfish farmers to use black carp when
it appears other methods don’t work.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
