Scientists are migrating nearly extinct species to new locations

SCROLL TO CONTINUE By Dino Grandoni and Matt McClain September 15, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT WICHITA As climate change and other threats destroy the habitats of living things, biologists are beginning to think of doing the once unthinkable: finding new homes for species outside their native ranges. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement For weeks, Erica Royer has been preparing these cinnamon- and cobalt-colored birds for a flight thousands of miles across the Pacific to their new island home. To get them ready, she’s played tropical island noises — rainfall, seabird squawks, the occasional ATV — from a portable speaker while feeding and cleaning her tiny flock, each a member of a species called the sihek, or Guam kingfisher. “We want them to get used to the sounds,” said Royer, an aviculturist with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Soon, these nine young kingfishers reared here at the Sedgwick County Zoo will fly free in forests. However, they are not going back to their native Guam. Instead, Royer and her team are sending them to a completely different Pacific island — one they hope gives their feathered kind a better chance at survival. At the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., Aviculturist Erica Royer holds a candle to a Guam kingfisher egg to check on the health of the embryo. Allowing a species to live in nonnative habitats, the logic goes, is better than losing it altogether. The practice goes by a few names, including assisted migration, assisted colonization or managed relocation. Such relocations have been suggested or carried out for deer in Florida, turtles in Australia, lizards in the Virgin Islands and rare plants in Nevada as rising temperatures, invasive pests or other threats render those creatures’ habitats uninhabitable. Species going through assisted migration Guam kingfisher Nine birds relocating through assisted migration this year Japan 3,600 miles Hawaii Guam Palmyra Atoll Papua New Guinea Past Western swamp turtle Starting in 2016, scientists have carried out assisted migration trials of more than 200 of these Australian turtles to East Augusta and Meerup, more than 200 miles south of their indigenous range. Present Hawaiian crow Biologists plan to release five crows, native to Hawaii’s Big Island, on Maui. Only about 120 remain in captivity. Potential Key deer Threatened by sea level rise in the Florida Keys, the Key deer has been proposed as a candidate for assisted migration. Guam kingfisher Nine birds relocating through assisted migration this year Japan Hawaii Guam Palmyra Atoll Papua New Guinea Past Present Potential Western swamp turtle Hawaiian crow Key deer Starting in 2016, scientists have carried out assisted migration trials of more than 200 of these Australian turtles to East Augusta and Meerup, more than 200 miles south of their indigenous range. Biologists plan to release five crows, native to Hawaii’s Big Island, on Maui. Only about 120 remain in captivity. Threatened by sea level rise in the Florida Keys, the Key deer has been proposed as a candidate for assisted migration. Guam kingfisher Nine birds relocating through assisted migration this year Japan Hawaii Guam Palmyra Atoll Papua New Guinea Past Present Potential Western swamp turtle Hawaiian crow Key deer Starting in 2016, scientists have carried out assisted migration trials of more than 200 of these Australian turtles to East Augusta and Meerup, more than 200 miles south of their indigenous range. Biologists plan to release five crows, native to Hawaii’s Big Island, on Maui. Only about 120 remain in captivity. Threatened by sea level rise in the Florida Keys, the Key deer has been proposed as a candidate for assisted migration. “There’s lots of interesting considerations there — biologically, socially, culturally, all of these things — that one has to work through to ensure that it’s the right thing to do,” said John Ewen, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London. “But it is an idea that’s happening more and more, that will happen increasingly in the future as we keep changing the planet,” he added. After the war, residents began spotting invasive brown snakes slithering around the island’s trees, probably stowaways from military aircraft or cargo ships. With no natural predators, the snakes proliferated, gobbling up the island’s small animals. Already, the snake has driven nine of Guam’s native forest birds to extinction. We did this,” said Scott Newland, president of the Sedgwick County Zoo who tracks the genetics of Guam kingfishers. Since then, keepers have bred the birds in zoos until they can make a return to the wild. People typically think keeping animals in captivity can prevent them from going extinct, said Megan Laut, a U.S. When we bring species in, what we want is to be able to release them back out into the wild.” For Guam’s Indigenous Chamorro people, the loss of an iconic bird wasn’t just an ecological one but a cultural one, too. “I feel as if all of my ancestry in the past is so in tune with this bird,” said Yolonda Topasna, a program coordinator at the Guam Department of Agriculture who is Chamorro. Her people and siheks, she added, “are one.” Efforts to trap and poison the tree snakes in Guam have had limited success so far. Zoos elsewhere, meanwhile, are running out of room to keep a captive flock big enough to prevent a dangerous amount of inbreeding. They aren’t the easiest birds to keep in captivity — territorial, aggressive and often poor parents, known for tossing eggs from nests or eating their own chicks. “The global population of sihek is chronically small, too small for any metric of long-term viability,” Ewen said. With nowhere else to go, scientists began looking for another place to put the birds. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners debated a number of islands before settling on releasing nine Guam kingfishers on the Palmyra Atoll, some 3,600 miles away from Guam. Royer and her team are sending are sending Guam kingfishers to another island, Palmyra Atoll, 3,600 miles away from Guam. This summer, it was Royer’s job to get the birds ready for the journey. Some of the chicks came to Kansas from zoos across the country — from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and even Disney’s Animal Kingdom, each stowed in incubators that birdkeepers either drove by car or flew by commercial airline to Wichita. The makeshift trailer here is retrofitted with everything a hungry, growing bird could want: Whirling ACs to ward off the summer heat. Whenever Royer slips through the metal door and three layers of mosquito netting into the trailer to feed them just after sunrise, the young birds know food is on the way and begin chirping. Even when they’re young, their calls are loud. One July morning, Royer held a dead lizard called an anole with tweezers and wiggled it in front of the nest cavity for a 1-month-old sihek named Hinanao, the last of the bunch to fledge. In the wild, adult siheks use their long beaks to divebomb trees and make holes to lay eggs and raise chicks. Here in Kansas, Royer cut a gallon jug in half to make Hinanao’s home. There is a long history of humans introducing animals — sometimes purposely, sometime by accident — to new locations with devastating results. There’s abundant forest canopy that we think the birds will find suitable for them,” said Katie Franklin, island conservation strategy lead for The Nature Conservancy. “Perhaps even most importantly, it’s predator-free.” Still, the siheks won’t be the only birds there. In the worst-case scenario, Palmyra is small enough for scientists to recapture all of the kingfishers if needed. Ecosystem modeling that the sihek team has done “gives us a lot of comfort that there’s really not going to be a significant impact to the food web there because there is just such an abundance and diversity of food sources for sihek, including invertebrates and geckos,” Franklin said. Already, biologists in Australia have introduced the western swamp turtle south of its Indigenous range as climate change is leading to premature drying of its seasonal wetland habitat. After the St. Croix ground lizard vanished from its namesake island in the Caribbean, translocated populations persisted on nearby islands free of invasive mongooses that eat the lizards. Native to Hawaii’s Big Island, it too went extinct in the wild after the arrival of Westerners. Biologists are also planning this year to release the crows on neighboring Maui, where there are no hawks. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages most endangered plants and animals in the country, recently recognized the need for accelerating relocations. “The impacts of climate change on species habitat are forcing some wildlife to new areas to survive, while squeezing other species closer to extinction,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said when issuing the new rules. For instance, a lithium and boron mining firm funded research in 2022 to see if a rare wildflower in Nevada called Tiehm’s buckwheat could be planted elsewhere, but the study found the flower was adapted to its native soil. “It’s a real corruption of the idea,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Instead of using assisted migration as a tool to respond to a crisis, it’s basically creating a crisis and then using assisted migration to mitigate that crisis.” For siheks, scientists insist something must be done to avoid extinction. If more space isn’t made available for more birds, the population is projected to crash due to inbreeding. “Because in many cases that could mean the alternative is extinction,” he added. But for those on Guam, it’s still painful to see an icon of the island spreading its wings so far away. “Who knows, maybe they’re really resilient and will be able to survive” on Guam, said Chelsa Muña, the department’s director. She added that it’s important to build skills among Guam scientists to care for siheks and would like to see people from the island more involved in future releases, noting that no local biologists helped rear the chicks. “That’s the next step in our intent for the project,” Muña said. Ewen, who chaired the sihek recovery team, said the Guam Department of Agriculture was a key partner in the project, and his team brought a journalist from Guam to Palmyra to tell the story of the birds’ journey. “Although no biologists from the Guam Department of Agriculture joined the team rearing the chicks at the biosecurity unit, this is something that we very much hope for in the future,” Ewen said, adding that the first release on Palmyra is being led by specialists who have worked with the birds in zoos for years. During the last week of August, Royer, the birdkeeper, accompanied her flock on a charter flight from Wichita to Southern California to Honolulu and finally to Palmyra. She’s retrofitted cat carriers to house all nine birds, each with its own compartment with a PVC pipe for a perch. On the island, she put the siheks in outdoor aviaries with plans to release them in the coming days. “It’s surreal,” she wrote by text. Royer cares for the young Guam kingfishers at the Sedgwick County Zoo, cleaning their enclosures, feeding them and playing sounds to help familiarize the birds with what it will sound like when they are released. “The ultimate goal is to get them back on Guam, and that is still a very good goal to have,” Newland said. “But let’s say we determine that it’s never going to happen — not from lack of trying, it’s just not possible. Isn’t it better to have siheks somewhere on this planet?” Royer said she relishes caring for these “small, sassy, mean birds,” but she looks forward to the day when she may no longer need to. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/guam-kingfisher-sihek-assisted-migration/