Climate Change Clouds Recovery of Fox Squirrel, Other Species

Matt Whitbeck saw a great blue heron wading in water along a scenic road through eastern Maryland’s Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and hit the brake.

Whitbeck, the refuge’s wildlife biologist, was at the wheel of a US Fish and Wildlife Service SUV on a crisp December morning, scanning the forest for Delmarva fox squirrels.

“You can see the ghost forest,” Whitbeck said. “You can see some of the trees are still alive, but they’re not long for this world.”

The heron stood in water that pooled just inches from the paved road, a more common occurrence as the Chesapeake Bay rises due to climate change. The surrounding forest fades the closer it is to the shoreline as saltwater inundates the soil beneath the trees, converting the woods to marshes and leaving behind a ghost forest with skeletons of pine and oak.

“When I give bus tours, this is the part where I talk about fox squirrels,” because the ghost trees were once their prime habitat, he said. Each year, the squirrels are seen farther and farther down the road.

As the Endangered Species Act turns 50 this week, the Delmarva fox squirrel represents one of the act’s biggest success stories in the Chesapeake Bay region. But the animal also exemplifies the threat climate change poses to endangered plants and animals and those that have recovered as ecosystems shift.

Matt Whitbeck, a wildlife biologist at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, in a forest that serves as habitat for the Delmarva fox squirrel.

Photographer: Bobby Magill/Bloomberg Law

Going Under Water

Gray, bushy, and weighing up to three pounds, a Delmarva fox squirrel is about twice the size of a common gray squirrel, but it’s only found in the Delmarva peninsula’s mature mixed oak and pine forests.

Logging and the expansion of farms on the Delmarva through the mid-20th century drove the fox squirrel nearly to extinction. The federal government stepped in to protect it in the 1960s, and it became one of the first species to be included on the endangered species list when the ESA took effect 50 years ago this week.

Over the decades, private landowners and regulators helped to re-grow some of the mixed forests the fox squirrel thrives in, and it rebounded to the point that the Fish and Wildlife Service declared it recovered and removed it from the endangered species list in 2015.

The fox squirrel was de-listed in part because its populations had grown so much that rising seas on the edges of its habitat range weren’t thought to pose a threat, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2012 status review for the squirrel.

Even so, “a lot of Blackwater refuge in southern Dorchester County will go under water and existing fox squirrel habitat will convert to tidal marsh,” Whitbeck said.

Not Designed for Climate Change

The eroding edges of the squirrel’s prime habitat shows that even recovered species are vulnerable to climate change, which poses one of the biggest challenges to the act’s implementation and the species that rely on it, legal experts say.

“When biodiversity is being threatened not only by loss of habitat and hunting, now we have climate change, which is altering habitat and accelerating the impacts of habitat loss,” said Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “The act isn’t designed to address climate change at all.”

Climate change is poised to simply overwhelm the capacity of the act to recover species, said J.B. Ruhl, co-director of the Energy, Environment and Land Use Program at the Vanderbilt University Law School.

Numerous species are imperiled by climate change, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Drought and rising temperatures threaten the lesser prairie-chicken in the plains of north Texas. Rising ocean temperatures, sea ice loss, and shifting food availability due to climate change are threatening the beluga whale.

The endangered key deer in the Florida Keys is losing habitat to saltwater intrusion and rising seas, both caused by climate change. The Fish and Wildlife Service fears North America’s smallest deer may eventually have little if any native habitat left.

“The Endangered Species Act can do a lot to help species adapt to climate change,” Ruhl said. “There’s a lot that climate change is going to do to species that the Endangered Species Act can’t solve. The statute eventually runs out of solutions.”

No single law can serve as a universal biodiversity conservation program in the face of climate change, said Murray Feldman, a partner at Holland & Hart LLP in Boise, Idaho.

“That is simply too much to load onto and expect from a program developed in the early 1970s when modern US environmental law and much conservation understanding was still nascent,” Feldman said.

Rising seas are killing trees and creating “ghost forests” at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland.

Photographer: Bobby Magill/Bloomberg Law

Act Remains Essential

But conservation groups insist the act is essential amid the twin climate and biodiversity crises, despite its shortcomings.

“We need the ESA more than ever,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Climate change has finally caught the public eye, but extinction threatens our way of life to the same degree.”

Humans rely on biodiversity for food, medicine, and ecosystem stability, which provide fresh water and moderate flooding, he said. Ecosystems are threatened by fossil fuels and land clearance, he said.

“The solution to both of these problems is protect more of the natural world,” he said.

Adaptation is key to conserving imperiled species in national wildlife refuges, Cynthia Martinez, Fish and Wildlife Service assistant director for the National Wildlife Refuge System, said in an interview.

Wildlife refuges are managed using a “resist, adapt, direct” framework for climate change.

“We will determine whether we’re going to try to manage in a way to resist climate change,” adapt to it, or direct species into new habitat that will become like their native habitat as ecosystems shift, she said.

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, which was created in 1933 to protect migratory birds, is grappling with whether it can fulfill the purpose for its establishment as rising seas shift the habitat the refuge protects, Whitbeck said.

Of all the species found at the refuge, the eastern black rail, which has mostly vacated its historic range north of North Carolina, may be the most imperiled as seas rise.

A migratory bird listed as threatened under the ESA, the eastern black rail is “a species that’s not doing great” because of rising seas, evidence of which is hard to ignore, Whitbeck said.

“If you open your eyes, it’s everywhere. All you have to do is look out the window,” Whitbeck said.