Tuesday, 8 Apr 2003

PORTLAND, Ore.

Deadlines are always a part of running any nonprofit, and the Xerces Society is no different. This week, we have deadlines for grant applications and deadlines for comments on a plan to spray pesticides. We also have self-imposed deadlines, because we are trying to produce several publication in a timely fashion.

We were asked by the Idaho Conservation League to supply information on a plan to spray pesticides to control Mormon crickets on public land in Idaho. Comments on the plan are due by April 15. Mormon crickets are not really crickets, but a species of shieldback katydid. From time to time, large populations of Mormon crickets will harm rangeland plants, which are also used as forage for cattle. Mormon crickets got their name in 1848, when hordes of the insects began to eat the crops of early Mormon pioneers in Utah. The story goes that when the settlers prayed for help, hordes of seagulls suddenly appeared and ate enough crickets to save their crops — and their lives.

The main issue is that these insects are a native part of the ecosystem and that much of the area that is slated to be sprayed is public land — land that is supposed to be managed for many uses, not just cattle grazing. To address this problem and provide meaningful feedback, I have contacted a lawyer to see if a recent court ruling on the large-scale spraying of pesticides for tussock moths would have any bearing on the spraying for Mormon crickets. The recent ruling stopped all Btk spraying on about 650,000 acres of Douglas-fir forests on national forestland in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington state for the control of tussock moths.

I have also contacted an expert on grasshoppers in an attempt to get the latest information on the impact of using these pesticides over large areas, alternatives to pesticides control, and the benefits that these insects provide to rangeland ecosystems. (Mormon crickets can be an important food source for a variety of wildlife.) Today, I am just pulling all of this information together and reading it. Once I have gathered and digested the information, it will be time to write it up in a coherent manner and send it to the official in charge of the project.

Other projects I have going today include revising a chapter for one of our upcoming books (more on that in the following days), updating a presentation on endangered invertebrates I will give at Lewis and Clark College tomorrow, and working on reports and proposals to foundations.

But the big issue I am working on today involves monarch butterflies. Most people have heard the story of the monarch: Each year, tens of millions of them migrate to overwinter in fragments of the Oyamel fir forest in the mountains of Michoacan, Mexico. What most people do not know is that the monarch butterfly is divided into two populations by the Rocky Mountains. The western population of monarchs makes a shorter migration, often only a few hundred miles, to overwinter at more than 300 sites along the California coast, from north of San Francisco to the Mexican border. Each site is small, most containing less than 20,000 individuals in isolated groves of trees. But like their relatives that fly to Mexico, the California monarchs are threatened. Development, disease of the trees in which the butterflies overwinter, poor management at the sites, and weather fluctuations are leading to declines in the overwintering populations. During the winter of 2001-2, these sites harbored approximately 1.5 million monarchs. This winter estimates vary, from 1 million to as few as 200,000 — perhaps the lowest count in a decade.

The Xerces Society has been working to protect monarchs in California since the late 1980s, when Xerces founder Robert Michael Pyle started the California Monarch Project. We are hoping to reinvigorate that project by updating the information we have on the monarch overwintering sites and revising the Conservation And Management Guidelines For Preserving Monarch Butterfly Migration And Overwintering Habitat In California, produced by the society in the 1980s.

This project is particularly timely, because the California Coastal Commission (the agency responsible for management along California’s coast) is updating its local coastal plans. We are hoping to work with monarch scientists to update the guidelines and use them to promote good stewardship of the overwintering sites.

It’s now late and I am trying to get out the door, which is not always as easy as it seems, what with last-minute changes to a proposal that needs to be sent tomorrow, discussions on how to proceed with editing a CD-ROM we are writing, and, of course, the not-so-important side conservations I get into along the way. More news from my week tomorrow.