Funding Bird Conservation

Mar 15

By Terry Rich, Golden Eagle Guest Blogger

Funding for environmental conservation has always fallen short of the need. Whether you’re interested in whales, elephants, elk, salmon, waterfowl, warblers, or plants, or all of these and more, the money for research and protective action has never been enough. The basic problem is that there are many species in decline and many threats. And with unending growth in the human population, this isn’t going to change anytime soon.

One way to deal with this predicament is to prioritize needs. This doesn’t solve the problem, but it does put the limited funds where they can do the most good. In the bird conservation world, we call these “needs assessments.” There are several steps to take.

Evaluate the Needs

First, we figure out how to evaluate the needs of different species. In Partners in Flight, we’ve been tweaking the needs assessment methodology for birds since it was first introduced in 1992. Each species can be evaluated on its population size, area of distribution, population trend, and threats. Species that are in least need of protection are the ones that have large populations, occupy large geographic areas, have increasing populations, and are subject to relatively low threat levels. One of the species in this happy situation is the Northern House Wren.

On the flip side, species with small populations, small geographic ranges, decreasing trends, and high threats have a high need. One of the species in this pickle is the Cassia Crossbill, right here in Idaho. In between these extremes are all the other bird species, each with a priority rank for conservation action.

Second, once we have arrayed the species from most in need of conservation to least in need, we have to figure out if we know why the species is in trouble. In many or most cases, we don’t know. Habitat loss, pesticide contamination, and climate change are widespread issues. Other threats, such as shooting, cat predation, or window collisions, are more specific. We can’t spend our limited funds wisely if we don’t know where to spend them.

If we don’t know the limiting factor for a priority species, we can do one of two things. We can keep moving down the list until we find a species we know how to help, or we can conduct research on the higher-priority species to see if we can figure out the problem. The trouble with research is that it takes time – perhaps many years, and money. So those tradeoffs have to be evaluated too.

Third, another part of the puzzle is the question, “who can do the work?” Once we know the species and the problem, an entity who has the capacity to take the conservation action needs to be identified. That might be a state agency, a federal agency, a non-governmental organization, or perhaps academia. Often, it’s some combination of all four. And because many of the birds of conservation concern migrate across international borders, these partners might be in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, or even South America. We work routinely with international partners, and relationships with our neighbors have been excellent.

International Cooperation

A program called Southern Wings was developed in 2009 by the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies to help address this problem. States who wanted to fund a project in, say, Mexico, could put money into a shared account partners could then compete for. Arizona was an early leader in Southern Wings. But many states, including Idaho, share birds with Mexico. If one of “our” birds is declining, and the problem is in Mexico, we need to get money to Mexico. Simple concept. Complex operation.

The early pioneer in this sort of international bird conservation was the North American Waterfowl Management Plan (1986). Due to the efforts of waterfowl hunters and wetland conservationists, mechanisms were established to get U.S. funding to Canada to help them with waterfowl conservation action in the legendary Prairie Potholes Region. Both countries benefitted enormously from this partnership, and it thrives to this day.

Non-governmental organizations, like the Bird Conservancy for the Rockies, American Bird Conservancy, and National Audubon Society, do not have to jump through the hoops that state and federal agencies do. So, within the constraints of their own missions and boards of directors, they can fund projects wherever they choose. The same is generally true of academic institutions. Although I hasten to point out that funding from granting entities may have all sorts of strings attached for any partner in a particular case.

One of the bird conservation funding sources I worked with while I was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2000 – 2014) was the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act (NMBCA). This act was established in 2000 to help get some additional funding to projects to conserve migratory birds, particularly those outside the U.S. The amount of grant funds was roughly $5 million a year.

Flammulated Owl by Thompson-Nicola Conservation Collaborative

Matching Funds Boost the Impact

And here’s the kicker. Proposals from outside the U.S. had to bring a 3:1 match to the table. So, for every $1 U.S., partners had to bring $3. In reality, approved grant proposals had an actual match of better than 4:1. I don’t know of another federal government grant program of any kind that has this sort of successful leverage.

$5 million is a pittance. Yet federal employees in charge of the NMBCA brought great experience, knowledge, and integrity to the program. Proposals from Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia and many other countries were replete with expertise from those countries. After evaluating grant proposals for several years, I realized we could have distributed $100 million a year – $400 million in conservation benefits – very wisely.

Since 2002, the NMBCA has provided more than $94.2 million in grants to support 747 projects in 43 countries. These projects have benefited over 6 million acres of bird habitat and spurred partnerships on multiple levels. An additional $363 million has been contributed by those partners. This program is a terrific way to leverage bird conservation funding.

Birds of Conservation Concern

Priorities are established by the assessments I mentioned above, conducted by a partnership of public and private entities. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency administering the NMBCA grants, conducts its own evaluation of those assessments to ensure the program follows all applicable federal rules and regulations. The most recent assessment is entitled, Birds of Conservation Concern (BCC) 2021 (https://www.fws.gov/media/birds-conservation-concern-2021). The BCC 2021 identifies 269 species or populations of conservation concern. An example of a population are the American Kestrels occurring in the southeastern U.S. Kestrels elsewhere are not of particular concern.

Wide Scope of Conservation Needs

Among those 269 species or populations, 135 taxa are of conservation concern at the continental scale, 88 at the Bird Conservation Region (BCR) scale, 29 on Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and 35 on Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. The number of taxa on the Hawaii/Pacific Island is in addition to species already listed under the Endangered Species Act. The latter have their own sources of funding, also woefully inadequate for the job.

Let’s look at some of the species and projects that have been funded by the program. You can search the projects database at https://www.fws.gov/grantsum/gsQuery. I searched first for projects that included Canada and one of the BCRs in Idaho. Those are the Northern Rockies and the Great Basin. I found six projects. Here are two of them.

The first is entitled, “Full Life-Cycle Conservation of the Long-billed Curlew.” This project also includes Mexico. The term “full life-cycle” means partners want to look at the entire annual cycle of the species, not just the breeding season or the wintering season.

Full life-cycle approaches have become the most common because, if the species has problems on the wintering grounds in Mexico, for example, it doesn’t necessarily help to take conservation action at the breeding grounds in Idaho. We must discover where and when the problem exists. This project seeks to apply best management practices for Long-billed Curlews on their breeding grounds and to protect 4,900 acres of wintering habitat in Mexico.

A second project is called, “Tracking Phalaropes to Inform Conservation Actions.” The species is Wilson’s phalarope, and this is an example of a project that seeks to discover where birds are stopping during spring and fall migration. We typically have good knowledge about where birds breed and where they spend the winter. But we often have poor knowledge about exactly where they are during migration. If some species is suffering mortality during migration, but not so much during the rest of the year, we need to find the place and the time.

Researchers will capture and tag birds with little devices that allow them to be detected by an array of Motus stations. For details on this recent technological development, see https://motus.org/.

One objective is to better understand how and when the species uses saline lakes. Many of these lakes in the Great Basin have suffered loss of water and changes in salinity due to human actions and climate change. It may be possible to improve water management if we know where and when it would help. This project extends to South America.

Support Professional Conservation

Preparing conservation assessments, assembling projects, finding money, evaluating proposals, and implementing final projects requires a variety of expertise from different regions and organizations. Knowledge, skills, and experience are brought to bear by individuals with a sincere interest in the well-being of wild animals. We need to do what we can to support these fine efforts into the future.

Golden Eagle Audubon Society https://www.goldeneagleaudubon.org