Charles P. Pierce picks up on a story from National Geographic. It All Started With a Few Trout. Now Yellowstone’s Iconic Birds Face ‘Collapse.'
DOUG SMITH DOESN’T remember the moment he realized that a serious ecological crisis was under way in Yellowstone National Park. But as more and more birds began to dwindle, what appeared before him was, he says, “an expanding picture of avian collapse.”
One of the first signs Smith spotted presented itself on the normally tranquil Riddle Lake in 2014. There, floating upside down, was a young trumpeter swan killed by a bald eagle. The cygnet was the last of an entire clutch of five siblings eaten by the mighty white-crowned raptors, an act that in one fell swoop wiped out all of the park’s newborn swans for the year.
...While an obvious next step would be to look toward the sky for answers, culprits in this whodunit can actually be found up and down the food chain. Swapping out and replacing just one fish species for another has set off a chain of events negatively impacting bears, eagles, ospreys, and more—and, in turn, spelling bad news for many of the park’s birds. (See more in a special issue of National Geographic devoted to Yellowstone.)
Read The Whole Thing. An invasive species in the wrong place. Stress from changing climate. Human impacts on sensitive species. It’s all coming together in the worst way. Now imagine this happening all over the planet.
And Pierce adds the capper: “Let us pause for a moment to consider if anyone in this administration* really gives a damn.”
Pierce goes on to quote Teddy Roosevelt:
We are coming to recognize as never before the right of the Nation to guard its own future in the essential matter of natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact, there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people, we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.