The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to list the red knot as federally threatened, and it will begin working on this monumental task soon. For a blog she recently posted, Sandy Bauers, the Philadelphia Inquirer environmental reporter, asked me what I thought about the listing and how it would help the red knot.
Red Knots in winter plumage feeding. Photo by Mark Peck
First, I thought of the benefits for the bird. Once listed, the red knot will be front-and-center in decisions affecting migratory stopovers, such as Delaware Bay that have been diminished by short-sighted management and wintering areas that have been worn to tatters by beachfront development and disturbance. It will also help other Arctic-nesting shorebirds, most of which are also quickly declining in numbers, their own futures much in doubt. It will help biologists and conservationists raise money to do the work necessary to restore the species. At the very least, it should arrest the ongoing declines.
Red knots in Bahia Lomas, Chile. Photo by Mark Peck
All of this does not overcome my more general feeling of sadness. Look at the history. If the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), Horseshoe Crab Management Board had listened to New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman in 1997, the horseshoe crab population would have been recovered by now, and the red knot would not have needed federal protection. Instead, ASMFC undermined Governor Whitman’s 1997 moratorium on horseshoe crab harvest, as well as Delaware’s attempted moratorium in 2005, and another New Jersey moratorium in 2006 that, despite the ASMFC’s interference, remains law today. Despite these attempts by Delaware Bay states to protect their own resources, the ASMFC – acting on the short-sighted interests of industrial-fishery concerns, mainly in Virginia, has repeatedly permitted unsustainably-high horseshoe crab harvests without regard to their impact. This recklessness continues today as the agency tries to re-designate Delaware Bay’s breeding crabs, whose population winters offshore of Maryland and Virginia, as breeders belonging to some other unknown breeding area. I fear this out-of-control commission will not stop until the horseshoe crab is “economically extinct”, just as they have done to the Bay’s Weakfish and Atlantic Sturgeon populations. When will it end?
A red knot brooding its young. Photo by Brad Winn
The red knot story is getting close to a conclusion, and no serious biologist can pretend to predict which way it will go. One thing, however, is clear: without a fully-restored Delaware Bay horseshoe crab population, the red knot and at least five other shorebird species will continue to decline. Without a swift rebound of horseshoe crabs and their eggs, extinction for the birds is inevitable. That this tragedy can happen within a few hours’ drive of both the political and economic centers of this country is unfathomable. How could anyone not be sad that we, as a nation, can’t accomplish this one small and clear task?
