The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced last week that listing the yellow-billed loon as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act is not necessary at this time.
Under the Endangered Species Act enacted by Congress in 1973 for a species to be considered endangered their line must be likely to become extinct throughout all or a large portion of their range. For a species to be considered threatened it must be proven that it is likely to become endangered in the near future.
The Center for Biological Diversity and others issued a petition in 2004 requesting the yellow-billed loon be placed on the Endangered Species list.
However, as field office supervisor for the Fairbanks Fish and Wildlife Field Office Sarah Conn points out, the population of the yellow-billed loon has been stable and even growing.
“At the moment the yellow-billed loon has several breeding populations, the one for which we have the most data, which is the one that occurs on the arctic coastal plain of Alaska, the trend over the last 20 or so years is that the species has a stable population. Some of the data suggests it’s even increasing slightly. That’s the population that we have the most information and we think is very representative of what’s going on with the loon as a whole.”
Conn says the petition was issued in 2004 and the Fish and Wildlife Service published a report in 2009 that included a 12 month study of the loons. She says it’s important when talking about the yellow-billed loon to look at the effects that climate change may have on the bird in the future.
“The yellow-billed loon is a species that nests on large lakes in the Arctic, it has a very low population to start with, there’s about somewhere between 16 and 32 thousand of these things nesting worldwide. It starts with a low population size. It occurs in areas where climate change is definitely affecting its world, where oil and gas and a number of other stressors are affecting it. And so the people who petitioned the Fish and Wildlife to consider it were concerned about the status of the species.”
With that in mind, the loon’s population is still stable. Although the yellow-billed loon is not being considered endangered or threatened, it remains a conservation priority for the Service. Working with tribal, state and federal partners, the Fish and Wildlife Service will continue to monitor and implement conservation measures in northern and western Alaska.