Support for the Act was almost unanimous in Congress in 1973. The Act was radical, covering not only the cute animals, but “any mammal, fish, bird, amphibian, reptile, mollusk, crustacean, arthropod or other invertebrate.”
Here’s a short list of what has come back: alligators, condors, peregrine falcons, ospreys, brown pelicans black footed ferrets. Puerto Rican parrots are recovering from a low of 13 to about 700. Manatees have gone from fewer than 1,300 to over 6,000 Whooping cranes went from 15 adults in 1938 to more than 500 today. Bald eagles went from 400 breeding pairs south of Canada to over 71,000 nesting pairs and have been taken off the endangered list.
We are still losing species, of course. People still hate the act. In our area developers and industries chafe under the need to conduct bog turtle studies. Timber rattlesnakes are protected, but many Pennsylvanians have not gotten the word.
The biggest threat to most species continues to be loss of habitat. If the warming climate won’t soon be controlled, we will lose thousands of species in a fairly short time span. Nonetheless, when you are toasting friends and football teams on New Year’s Eve, raise a glass to the Endangered Species Act. And next November elect people who will fund it.
Info for this post was found in the Winter 2023 issue of the Sierra Club magazine.
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