Endangered Animals

In the winter chill last January, a mountain goat named Celia was wandering through the rocky highlands of northern Spain when a tree fell and crushed her to death. With that, another species vanished from the Earth. Celia was the last remaining bucardo, a goat known for thick fur and extravagant horns, which had dwindled because of hunting, habitat destruction and landslides in its home high in the Pyrenees.

Deep in the jungle of the Bandipur animal reserve stands a straw shack. It shelters a key--and perhaps the weakest--link in the campaign to save India's tigers from extinction. A rusty .314-caliber bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder by a pajama drawstring, forest guard D.P. Rathore sips black tea as he sits in the shack surrounded by a ditch that keeps the wildlife at bay. He is one of only 16 officers who guard against poaching in the 320-square-mile Bandipur forest in southern India.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a Central Valley nut grower agreed Monday to an unusual strategy to protect the San Joaquin kit fox, an endangered species. The deal -- brokered by a national environmental group -- is only the second of its kind in California and is being hailed as a seldom-seen example of cooperation between the state's agricultural interests and the federal agency.

A senior official of the U.S. Interior Department, in a wide-ranging critique of the Endangered Species Act, said Thursday that the needs of an expanding population, agriculture interests and burgeoning development in the West should be given equal consideration with endangered plants and animals.

Thirty years ago, the herds of gazelle roaming the sands of Egypt's Western Desert were so vast that when the turn of a car's ignition startled them, they would run off in a column almost as long as the horizon, environmentalist Mustafa Saleh recalls. Now gazelles are an endangered species in Egypt.

In 1983, Betsy Dresser boarded a plane in Los Angeles with delicate cargo taped under her arm: a test tube containing embryos from a rare antelope bred several days earlier at the Los Angeles Zoo. After the four-hour flight, Dresser delivered the embryos to the Cincinnati Zoo, where they were successfully implanted into two other antelopes, one of them a different species. Two healthy calves were born nine months later and raised by their surrogate mothers.

Wild dogs were on the attack, intent on making a meal of a 6-month-old panda. Two peasants, roaming the mountainside in search of medicinal herbs, heard the commotion and frightened the dogs away. But the mother panda had also fled. The terrified youngster, too immature to survive alone, was left clinging to a tree. The farmers reported the incident to officials here at China's biggest panda refuge, who organized a watch.

It all started two decades ago with leopards, chimpanzees and crocodiles. Now, as 124 nations convene in Florida to decide the fate of the world's rarest and most coveted creatures, their mission has expanded in scope, encompassing more than 25,000 protected animals and plants--from orchids to tigers--that have been exploited for enormous worldwide profits.

Less than a year after he presided over the release of wolves into the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt returned Monday in a more somber mood as he sought to revive a project that has been nearly destroyed by a series of unsolved shootings. Only two of the 11 Mexican gray wolves released this year into the Apache National Forest are left. Four are known to have been shot. A fifth adult--last seen in mid-September--and a pup are also thought to be dead.

Ducks don't vote, eagles don't return a profit, whales can't bring short-term capital gains, manatees never have to meet a payroll, hairy-nosed wombats are underachievers, Kirtland's warblers are ineffective against high interest rates and no pearly-eyed thrasher of record ever licked a communist. By all the usual American standards of what is holy or useful, the rest of the animal kingdom ranks lower than a poor relative.