Giving wildlife a much-needed helping hand - Teaming with Wildlife plan - Creative Solutions

National Wildlife, Dec-Jan, 1997 by Roger DiSilvestro

Helping Hand

Not so long ago, the scissor-tailed flycatcher was a familiar sight during mating season throughout the Oklahoma prairies. But as grassland habitat has disappeared in the Sooner State, so has the strikingly beautiful flycatcher--Oklahoma's official state bird.

"Its numbers have declined by more than 50 percent in recent years," says Jeremy Garrett, information specialist for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. "It's just one of several grassland songbirds declining in the Great Plains region."

With some 900 nongame species and only about $130 to spend annually on each, Oklahoma wildlife managers are hard-pressed to stem the decline of the scissor-tailed fly-catch--er--or many other creatures that range within the state. "With our limited funds, we can only target certain nongame animals each year for research and habitat programs," says Garrett, "and even then we can't provide full coverage for those species."

Oklahoma is not alone in this predicament. All across the country, programs designed to protect populations of nongame wildlife face rising costs and serious shortages of funds--even though such animals as songbirds, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals constitute more than 90 percent of the 1,800 or so vertebrate species found in the United States.

Moreover, many nongame animals are declining so seriously due to habitat loss and other problems that they are likely candidates for the Endangered Species List, where protecting them becomes an even more expensive proposition. "The declining status of nongame wildlife, combined with the lack of funding for nongame programs, is a serious situation that has been ignored for far too long," says NWF senior scientist Douglas Inkley.

A solution, says Inkley, is a new concept called Teaming with Wildlife that is designed to provide states with much-needed funds for proper management of nongame animals. The concept has been endorsed by 13 governors and more than 2,400 conservation and other groups, including 500 companies.

Presently, the states raise nongame funds through a variety of techniques, including income-tax checkoffs that allow citizens to make donations to nongame management by contributing a portion of their state income-tax refunds. But the money fluctuates yearly depending on the whims of donors, making long-term planning impossible for state wildlife officials. Other sources of revenue, such as the sale of conservation license plates, are similarly inconsistent and declining.

This dilemma was supposedly solved in 1980 when Congress enacted the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, authorizing as much as $5 million in federal funds yearly for nongame conservation. But in the past 17 years, not a single penny has ever been appropriated by Congress. "To be successful, nongame wildlife managers need a steady, reliable source of funding," says Inkley. "And that's where Teaming with Wildlife comes in, because it's based on a funding approach history shows is stable and successful."

That approach is the federal game-management funding system, the result of two laws: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 and the Federal Aid in Fish Restoration Act of 1950. Together, these measures raise about $400 million yearly for management of deer, trout and other game animals through excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment.

With support from both hunters and nonhunters and bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill, the Teaming with Wildlife initiative is now being debated in Congress. If the bill passes, it will produce an estimated $350 million a year for state nongame conservation. Under the new plan, Congress would levy a small excise tax on some outdoor recreational equipment. The revenue would be used to research wildlife, enhance habitat, create new recreation access sites and help educate the public about wildlife and the outdoors. The estimated cost of the tax to outdoor users would be $5 to $10 annually.

The base support for such a tax would be an American public that often puts its money where its enthusiasms lie. Wildlife viewing is the fast--est-growing outdoor recreation activity in the nation. A 1996 survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that nearly 63 million people participate every year in a wildlife-watching activity. In all, such activities generate more than $30 billion yearly in revenues.

"Nobody likes the T-word," observes Naomi Edelson, project coordinator of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group that along with NWF is part of the broad-based coalition supporting the initiative. "But the fact is that we are on a dangerous collision course," she says. "The number of people who enjoy the outdoors continues to grow, while both the wildlife they are seeking and the funds necessary to provide those outdoor activities continue to decrease. We can either pay a little bit now to maintain and enhance our wildlife and wild lands, or we can pay a lot later when problems with many creatures reach a critical level."