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With a voracious appetite for insects, a long snout, and beady little eyes, the Buena Vista Lake ornate shrew is one of California's most intriguing mammals. Today, 95 percent of its former one-million-acre wetland and riverine habitat in the southern Tulare Basin has been destroyed, and by 2002, fewer than 30 individual Buena Vista Lake ornate shrews were believed to remain on Earth.
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROFILE
PROTECTION STATUS: Endangered
YEAR PLACED ON LIST: 2002
CRITICAL HABITAT: 84 acres in Kern County, California designated in 2005
RECOVERY PLAN: Included in Recovery Plan for Upland Species of the San Joaquin Valley, 1998
RANGE: Formerly presumed to have occurred throughout almost one million acres of wetlands and riparian forests that ringed the massive Tulare, Buena Vista, Kern, and Goose Lakes in the southern Tulare Basin in California; now four remaining populations on 575 acres scattered along a 70-mile stretch of the basin’s west side
THREATS: Water diversion, agricultural expansion, pesticide spraying, selenium poisoning, and drought
POPULATION TREND: Historic population numbers are not known, but 1999 surveys found seven shrews in Kern National Wildlife Refuge, nine in Cole Levee Ecological Preserve, and five along the Kern Fan. Twenty-five individuals, comprising the largest known population, have been seen in a small pond without guaranteed water flow called Gator Lake.
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SAVING THE BUENA VISTA LAKE ORNATE SHREW
The Buena Vista Lake ornate shrew has been thought to be imperiled since it was first discovered by Joseph Grinnell in 1932. By that time, most of Tulare Basin's wetlands had already been drained to create an immense network of croplands, roads, ditches, and dikes. Though the Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973, it was not until 1988 that an effort was mounted to save this tiny mammal. In that year, the Interfaith Council for the Protection of Animals and Nature petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the shrew as an endangered species. The Service made an initial finding that it might warrant federal protection that December, but then left the shrew hanging as its habitat continued to dwindle.
Rather than processing the petition and issuing a final decision by 1990 as required by the Endangered Species Act, the Service put the shrew on the federal candidate list as a Candidate 2 species in 1989. In 1991 it upgraded the animal to Candidate 1 status, meaning the Service had enough information to issue a proposed listing rule. But the listing proposal was delayed another nine years until June 1, 2000. In the spring of 2001, with a final protection rule nowhere in sight, the Center for Biological Diversity, California Native Plant Society, and Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project approached the Department of Interior with a creative plan to protect the shrew and 28 other imperiled species. In August the agreement was finalized, requiring the shrew to be listed as an endangered species by March 6, 2002.
Beginning in 2002, the Center defended the shrew against agribusiness interests, which twice sued to delist the species. We intervened successfully, getting the first case dismissed and in the second case persuading the court to uphold the listing. In the latter case, the Center also obtained an order from the judge to designate critical habitat — a creative maneuver that achieved positive environmental protection from within a suit originally brought to stop protection. Critical habitat was designated in 2005, but included only 84 of the almost 5,000 acres originally proposed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Challenging the size of that critical habitat decision was part of a large-scale, 55-species legal action we brought in August 2007.
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Contact:
Ileene Anderson
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