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Endangered Hawk Vanishing From Everglades

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McClatchy-Tribune

Published: August 27, 2008

MIAMI - It's never a good sign when an animal disappears from the place that gave it its name.

That's what is happening to the Everglades snail kite, an endangered hawk whose numbers are in a sickening free fall from the compounded effects of back-to-back droughts and a long-controversial water management scheme intended to protect another equally at-risk bird.

Though biologists have not yet wrapped up the latest annual count, they have seen enough to know the kite has dropped to its lowest numbers in decades. There may be fewer than 1,000 birds left, not even a third of the population in 2000.

"The situation is dire. It's critical," said Wiley Kitchens, a University of Florida research ecologist who leads a team that conducts the annual kite surveys. "The birds are simply not replacing themselves."

Aside from several dozen adults, the birds also have largely abandoned their prime haunts of the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee. Now, most surviving birds live in a chain of Central Florida lakes a hundred miles north, with the bulk of the nests in Lake Tohopekaliga, the largest lake in Osceola County. Ringed with homes and buzzing with bass and ski boats, Lake Toho seems an unlikely haven, yet it has what the remnant Glades marsh far to the south does not - kite food.

For the Miccosukee Tribe, the kite's accelerating death spiral is "alarming, but to us not surprising," spokeswoman Joette Lorian said. She called it compelling evidence that federal wildlife protections are failing in the Everglades.

For a decade, the tribe argued that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's plan to protect another endangered bird that lives only in Everglades National Park, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, was harming tribal lands and the rest of the River of Grass. The sparrow plan, subject to years of dispute among agencies, the tribe and environmentalists, seasonally closes floodgates along the Tamiami Trail to protect key nesting areas of the tiny bird from flooding.

The tribe claims the practice stacks high water in nearly 90,000 acres of tribal lands north of the Trail, effectively drowning tree islands and a key critter in the Everglades food chain - the apple snail, the kite's primary source of food. The graceful bird, most often seen gliding over marsh scanning for snails, comes equipped with a distinctive needle-sharp hooked beak adept at extracting soft flesh from the hard, golf-ball-size shells.

Paul Souza, field supervisor in the Wildlife Service's Vero Beach office, said he shares the concern and has met with Kitchens and South Florida water managers to discuss the options. But he believes the biggest factor is something no agency can control - nature.

"We don't know for sure what the answer is," he said, but wildlife managers say the back-to-back two-year droughts play a big part, killing off snails in much of the Glades. "We've seen relative stability in the snail population in nondrought years."

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