The nation’s two largest general news organizations – the AP and the NYTimes (via its  deal permitting open use of some items from the E&E Greenwire service) – filled us in Friday on the legal limbo of a little creature called the American pika. The Fish & Wildlife Service rebuffed urging by private advocacy organizations to put the cute rabbit-relatives, denizens of colder and mostly mountainous part of Western North America, on the endangered species list due to climate change.

Greenwire‘s Patrick Reis writes it as a straight, one-event news story.

The AP‘s Mike Stark shows more initiative, contacting officials and biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service to see what they really think. His piece reflects ground covered – although presumably re-reported here – by press releases from the feds and from the enviro group that handled the pro-endangerment effort.  This story thus has a good deal more nuance than to suggest the feds are just not interested. They are, it says here, paying attention to the frisky little rock hoppers. But they don’t yet feel confident that the whole species is in danger or, less dire unless you’re a Nevada pika perhaps, just a few subpopulations in regions on the warm fringes of their current range. This story appears to be an extensive update on one Stark filed earlier in the news cycle.

This news could be an entry into a longer length feature on a dilemma posed by the Endangered Species Act in a time of climate change. Pikas of several closely-related varieties live across a huge swath of the West, from California and the Southwest all the way to the Brooks Range in Alaska. Maybe out on the tundra too, but I only looked up Brooks Range’s pikas to confirm they’re there.

The issues involve how distinct the subpopulations are, whether they merit separate endangerment standing, and whether a shift in range of an animal, including its extirpation here and there while it may expand elsewhere, is the sort of risk that fits the ESA’s original intent. I’m fuzzy on those issues and would welcome a news piece that explores them. The Pika is a less iconic creature but its plight resembles those of glamorous animals such as polar bears and walruses that might well disappear from, say, some of the margins of Siberia, Alaska, and northwest Canada, but hang on indefinitely along and offshore of northern Greenland and in the Canadian arctic archipelago.

The news, one thinks, would once have attracted extensive regional media attention in areas where pikas now live. A few large to medium West Coast outlets did the news themselves. But, a quick search indicates, it resulted mostly in use of wire copy.

Other stories:

• LA Times – Margo Roosevelt: US declines to list the American pika as endangered ;
• Seattle Times – Lynda V. Mapes: Pika won’t be listed for protection, feds say.
• Reno Gazette-Journal – Jeff DeLong: Environmental groups blast feds for deciding pika isn’t endangered ; Nice, enterprising piece. The two main press releases cover much the same ground, but it appears that DeLong dug in for more detail and color.
• NatGeo News Watch (blog) Stuart L. Pimm: High-living pika can help us understand our fate ; Kudos to this expert,  non-journalist’s take. Pimm has seen quite a few pikas. He is a conservation biologist. He knows there are pikas all over the northern hemisphere, not just N. America. He likes them and argues well that we all should worry about them and other members of their ecosystems. This is an essay and news piece (he quotes a few experts) with spirit. He also shares a fine map a source gives him, showing where expected climate change could extinguish pikas, in red, and where probably not in blue.

Grist for the Mill:

At the eco-legal-advocacy organization EarthJustice’s site, Shirley Hao blogs on the issue, and links to a charming Richard Attenborough report on their winter haypiles; EarthJustice Press Release notable for another non-pika reason – a matter-of-fact reference to “carbon dioxide pollution.” One wonders whether the lumping of CO2 with NOx, SO2, and other standard pollutants will take root in general conversation.

US Fish & Wildlife Service Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.