by Ron Arnold
Bad science and corrupt bureaucrats turned a beautiful migratory songbird that nests only in Texas into a 1990s terror that good science and concerned citizens are now fighting to exonerate.
The songbird is the golden-cheeked warbler and the fear it instills comes from its status as an endangered species protected by a bureaucracy that confiscates property, bankrupts businesses and imprisons decent people – and we now know that the warbler was never endangered at all.
A coalition of three groups, Texans for Positive Economic Policy, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Reason Foundation, hand-delivered a petition to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) offices in Washington, DC, requesting that the warbler be removed from the endangered list, citing verified scientific evidence of ample populations and abundant habitat.
The official story is that the golden-cheeked warbler was erroneously believed to be rapidly going extinct when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 on an emergency basis. The FWS claimed the warbler’s best breeding habitat was primarily in the mature juniper nesting trees of the Hill Country that spreads westward from the outskirts of Austin, a bungled guess based on outmoded 10-year-old satellite mapping and an unverified 14-year-old study of warbler density.
The details are not so innocent: the golden-cheeked warbler listing petition was a handwritten document dated February 1, 1990, signed “Timothy Jones, Earth First!” (the vandalism-and-arson radical group). The petition wasn’t challenged by the FWS addressee, Alisa Shall, Wildlife Biologist, or anyone else in the agency. The warbler was simply listed upon Jones’ request.
The listed warbler instantly became a weapon for the FWS to restrict landowners’ use of their property and even jeopardized military training. And some federal officials frightened landowners into selling at panic prices to environmental groups.
Margaret Rodgers, an elderly lady who owned a ranch west of Austin, was clearing a fencerow of invading young junipers so she could rebuild the fence they were pushing down so badly that her livestock got out – a familiar problem to Hill Country ranchers. An informer told FWS Field Supervisor Robert M. Short, who wrote to Mrs. Rodgers in December 1990, that her property “supports prime habitat for the federally-listed endangered golden-cheeked warbler,” and threatened her with criminal and civil penalties for cutting the 6-foot high junipers (hardly “prime habitat”): “Section 11(b)(1) provides for a fine of not more than $50,000 or imprisonment up to one year, or both.”
Mrs. Rodgers immediately warned fellow ranchers of Short’s threat and something odd: The Nature Conservancy had already bought out adjoining parcels of the ranch owned by relatives, and she had just refused a lowball offer from the Conservancy to buy her land. Nobody believed that the timing of the Nature Conservancy’s offer and Field Supervisor Short’s letter were coincidence.
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