Ghosts in the Thickets

New England cottontails are archetypal Yankees. For centuries, they thrived in all six New England states and, except for a sliver of New York, nowhere else. They maintain low profiles, scratch their livings out of marginal habitats, and are a bit fussy. Though they’ve got the extraordinarily productive reproductive tracts typical of rabbits – a female can bear up to 24 young a year – New England cottontails are not breeding like rabbits. In fact, their populations have plummeted in recent years.

As I toured one of the cottontails’ diminishing habitats this winter in Durham, New Hampshire, I saw no sign of the furtive rabbits. True, the ground was bare of snow in the thorny, tangled thickets near the railroad tracks, the type of habitat New England cottontails need, so it was not ideal tracking conditions (they drop about 60 pellets an hour, which show up best on snow). And the rabbits are notoriously reclusive. But the bigger problem, regionwide, is that there are simply very few of these rabbits left.

At the start of this decade, the number of New England cottontails had fallen so low that four environmental organizations petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the rabbits under the Endangered Species Act. But in September, the feds opted to put them in a sort of limbo, on a list of species that warrant but don’t actually get endangered-species protection. In other words, the Fish and Wildlife Service has bigger fish to fry. The Bush White House has been using this limbo designation far more than prior administrations – there are now 279 species on the candidate list – while naming far fewer as threatened or endangered.

The New England cottontail is a cute if rarely seen animal. But lacking charisma and a strong constituency, it’s also an animal that is on the brink of quietly disappearing as people change its landscape and federal regulators delay the protections their own science says the rabbits require.

More than 15 years ago, John Litvaitis started looking for an animal he could study over time, one that would reflect changes in the New England landscape. The University of New Hampshire professor of wildlife ecology settled on the New England cottontail. It’s hard to imagine that any animal would have better served his purposes or that any other biologist would have better documented the animal and its abrupt decline.

The New England cottontail may be the only animal with a native range so nearly restricted to New England; they once thrived from the Hudson River to Cape Cod, from Lake Champlain to Penobscot Bay. They are thicket specialists. Their ideal habitat is a clearing that’s been growing for five to 20 years or naturally occurring shrub-land. These are the sorts of places where it is impossible to walk, commonly known as brambles or, of course, brier patches. Litvaitis, in his gold-rimmed glasses and pin-striped button-down shirt, is tall and professorial. But on the ground, he’s clearly a field biologist, moving through thorny shrubs with ease. This winter, he led me on a tour of one such area.

Thickets are not the sorts of places people get wacky about. They lack the majesty of old-growth forests, the orderly grandeur of grasslands. They are something between the two – messy. This sort of mess was abundant in the mid-1900s, as many New England farms were abandoned, and the land was left to grow over – creating what was likely the all-time high for the New England cottontail population. (Of course, other defunct farms became subdivisions and shopping malls.) Over the decades, the thickets on these abandoned farms matured into forests, which benefited many native wildlife species. But not the cottontails.

In 2000, after the environmental groups petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the rabbits as endangered or threatened, the service contracted with Litvaitis to survey the animals for three years, from 2001 to 2004. He found that the range of New England cottontails had decreased from 90,000 square kilometers in 1960 to 12,180 square kilometers in 2004; they were absent from 93 percent of 2,300 habitat patches searched within their historical range. In Vermont, where they had once abounded, the rabbits have not been seen since 1971. And those that lived in southwestern New Hampshire died off sometime in the past two decades. The cottontails are now down to five geographically separate populations: in western Connecticut, eastern New York, and southwestern Massachusetts; eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island; Cape Cod; New Hampshire’s Merrimack River Valley; and a swath along the coast from New Hampshire into southern Maine.

It’s that last swath we’re walking in now. More precisely, it’s the University of New Hampshire’s West Foss Farm near the campus in Durham. With us is Steve Eisenhaure, a university forester who recently oversaw a timber cut on the farm that will open up some cottontail habitat; it looks raw now, but in five years, it will have grown into a good thicket.

Near the timber cut, we see prime thickets. We see old cellar holes, in which the rabbits like to den. We see fields and stone walls, some large oaks and hickories and white pines. What we don’t see are rabbits. “They are not an animal that’s easy to encounter,” says Litvaitis. “You could have them literally in your backyard and not know it.” New England cottontails are active at dawn, dusk, and night. From observing this patch of ground over the years, Litvaitis is pretty certain that there are some cottontails either here or in the thickets across the nearby railroad tracks, but they are making themselves scarce.

Eastern cottontails look darned similar to their New England cousins, but are more conspicuous. You’ll see them hopping around the edges of fields, even suburban lawns. Native to the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, and the Southeast, Eastern cottontails have been widely introduced in most of New England by hunting clubs; Maine is the one state they have not yet invaded.

Part of the introduced rabbit’s advantage is that the native New England cottontail is more susceptible to predation. Litvaitis once conducted an experiment with both New England cottontails and Eastern cottontails in an enclosure, studying which would stray farther from cover to get food. The New England cottontails were so reluctant to go into the open that by the time they did, they were too famished to look around while eating. “They get themselves into such a dire state,” says Litvaitis, “that they no longer behave as a rabbit should in an open situation: Feed a little, scan a little.” Though Litvaitis and his team now understood the rabbits’ feeding styles, they didn’t know how much this behavior cost the New England cottontails until a barred owl began haunting the area at night. The owl nabbed twice as many New England cottontails as Eastern ones. In addition to being less careful, the New England cottontails simply don’t see predators as well as the Eastern rabbits; one of the big differences between the New England and Eastern cottontails is that the former have smallish eyes and the latter, bug eyes twice as large. (Another field mark, not always apparent, is a black spot between the ears of the native rabbits.)

The nearsighted New England cottontails stay hunkered down in separated groups. Historically, they have depended on thickets occurring naturally along streams or those growing up in the wake of disturbances such as windstorms, hurricanes, and fires. To get from one thicket to another, the rabbits now need to traverse suburbs, roads, interstates, and parking lots. With their aversion to straying from cover, they are simply not making that journey. They stay in place, the habitat deteriorates, and the rabbits die.

If you want to imagine the last moments of a population, picture fewer and fewer rabbits retreating to smaller and more isolated patches of increasingly marginal habitat. They weigh less than healthy rabbits and are less vigorous. Weakened and poorly hidden, they are munched by a fox, say, or a coyote. Another population has “winked out,” to use the biological jargon.

When a species is threatened with extinction, its advocates will typically pull out all the stops to make the case for its importance. For a rare plant, they will say there’s a chance that a lifesaving drug will be discovered in its bark or flowers. For a “keystone species” like the grizzly bear or Pacific salmon, champions will say that if it disappears, the arch of the ecosystem it holds together will come crashing down. Then there are “indicator species,” whose health reveals the state of the habitats they require. The spotted owl, to take one high-profile endangered animal, is often referred to as both a keystone species and an indicator of robust old-growth forest ecosystems.

Protecting old-growth forests, for spotted owls and others, is not a tough sell. Our collective ecological imagination seems to value forests above all else – they represent the pristine and primeval. We don’t think of thickets the same way. Worse, creating thickets often means doing what Eisenhaure has done here, cutting down those trees considered emblematic of enlightened environmental stewardship. Before it’s a thicket, it’s often a clear-cut, and that is a tough sell.

And even if you can sell the public on thickets, it’s harder to persuade people on the value of the rabbits themselves. While New England cottontails are indicators of good thickets – improve habitat for them, and you benefit other native species like golden winged and prairie warblers, woodcocks, and black racer snakes – I have not heard anybody argue that they are a keystone species. Further, they don’t really grab people. “I can’t put the grizzly-bear awe onto this animal, no matter how hard I try,” Litvaitis says.

The Endangered Species Act was drafted to protect not only bald eagles, grizzly bears, and, most recently proposed, polar bears – the charismatic megafauna – but also beady-eyed fussy rabbits of little ecological consequence. The September decision was a mixed message for the petitioners. On the one hand, the Fish and Wildlife Service was agreeing that the New England cottontail is on its way out and needs protection. (Candidate species are assigned priority rankings of one through 10, depending on how dire their circumstances; the cottontail came on near the top, at two). But on the other hand, the service said, it’s not going to get protection right now.

Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona nonprofit that advocates for endangered species nationwide, says, “Candidate species protection is essentially death row for species, because we are admitting that they are warranted, but we are not actually providing them that protection.” Greenwald says this sort of designation is part of a broad pattern in the current Bush White House, which has protected the fewest species of any administration since the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973. “To date, they’ve only listed 56 species, and that’s compared to 512 under the Clinton administration and 234 under Bush’s father’s administration.”

Viewing the decision favorably is Michael Amaral, senior endangered species specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Concord, New Hampshire. He says he is “ecstatic” about the species becoming a candidate and the high priority it was assigned. He even thinks it may be helpful to have the cottontail on the list of candidate species for a couple of years, as opposed to being protected right away. “What’s really going to decide whether we are able to turn that species around is how much we can get the cooperation of state wildlife agencies,” says Amaral. “And if we’d gone immediately to a proposal to list it, I think a lot of the state wildlife agencies, whose cooperation we need, would’ve sat back and said, ‘OK, the feds have already decided this thing’s going to get listed, and it doesn’t matter what we do.’ ”

Trouble is, the Endangered Species Act was designed to protect animals, not coddle states or industries. That’s what the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service attempted with Maine Atlantic salmon. In 1997, Governor Angus King was livid over a proposal to call the salmon endangered, claiming it would hurt Maine’s fish-farming industry. So Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt accepted a weaker state conservation plan as an alternative. Conservation groups filed suit, and the federal agencies opted to begin protecting the species just days before they were due in court. In another effort to appease, the Fish and Wildlife Service cited its interest in maintaining a cooperative relationship with the timber industry when it recently opted to exclude commercial timberlands in Maine, Minnesota, and Montana from “critical habitat” designations for the Canada lynx, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It’s a decision that’s already being challenged in court.

Opting not to give deserving species the full protections of the Endangered Species Act lands the Fish and Wildlife Service in court over and over again. Pat Parenteau, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, says there is a distinct pattern at work: The agency makes a controversial decision, and it’s challenged in court; the agency usually loses, then complains that it would be more effective at protecting endangered species if it didn’t spend all of its time in court. “The more time that they say they’re not going to do it, the more time they spend in court. The more time they spend in court, the more time they say they can’t do it,” says Parenteau. “It really is a classic vicious circle.” He says legal options are limited after a species is placed on the candidate list, which he calls a “legal black hole.” Once on the candidate list, he says, species are effectively shielded from further legal challenges.

Amaral says his agency is hamstrung not only by lawsuits but also by funding limitations. Fish and Wildlife Service budget data show its Threatened and Endangered Species program has grown steadily. In 1982, it was just $10.5 million. By 2006, it was $147.8 million. Still, it’s a pittance in a federal budget of $2.6 trillion; we spend more daily on the war in Iraq.

For Greenwald, of the Center for Biological Diversity, the issue is not really money. “We support increasing funding; that’s something we are going to lobby for in the new Congress,” he says. “However, this administration actually has more money for listing than they have had before. This administration is doing less with more.”

Things could change with the new Congress. Eviscerating the Endangered Species Act was famously the goal of US Representative Richard Pombo, a California Republican who was at the helm of the House Resources Committee. Even with the GOP in control of Congress, Pombo was unable to muster political support to weaken the act. (Pombo lost his reelection bid last fall.) It’s likely the new Congress will take a fresh look at all aspects of the act, including those many species languishing on the candidate list.

Politics aside, the Fish and Wildlife Service is working to protect the rabbits that live on the land it manages. Earlier in the day that I visited Litvaitis, I stopped at the Wells National Estuarine Reserve in Maine, where a large tractor was mowing down a stand of mature alders – they’d gone past the ideal shrubby thicket stage – to create what will be good New England cottontail habitat in five years. Protecting the rabbits on federal lands will be helpful, but it won’t be nearly enough: Just one-third of the sites the rabbits now inhabit have conservation status, and fewer than a 10th of these are managed as thickets.

Litvaitis was disappointed that the New England cottontails weren’t designated as threatened or endangered last September, because it would have brought attention to their plight and made more federal money available for their recovery. Walking back to his office in the gloaming as students bustle by listening to iPods or talking on cellphones, I ask about the rabbits’ prognosis. Like most scientists, Litvaitis is fairly cautious but says he has done some computer modeling to see how the animals will fare: “Take away a big chunk of habitat, and things go downhill very quickly.”

Even Litvaitis, who knows New England cottontails better than anyone and has a clear affection for them, says he can’t make the case that there will be any ramifications if the rabbits disappear. “This animal not being on the landscape does not come with profound consequences,” he says. All of Vermont’s New England cottontails died off quietly decades ago. Can anyone sense their shy ghosts in the diminishing thickets? Other New England species like the Labrador duck, the passenger pigeon, the heath hen, and the sea mink have gone extinct in the past two centuries, recalled only by mounted specimens and written recollections. Would many really care if the New England cottontail follows?