Wind Power Safety

KQED, a public television station in San Francisco, recently ran a program on bird mortality at the Altamont Pass called Fatal Attraction: Birds and Wind Turbines. You can view the segment below or at the station website.

Penguins to Have Endangered Species Review

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it will consider listing 10 species of penguins under the Endangered Species Act.

The 10 species under consideration for a protection ruling include the emperor penguin, the southern rockhopper penguin, the northern rockhopper penguin, the fiordland crested penguin, the erect-crested penguin, the macaroni penguin, the white-flippered penguin, the yellow-eyed penguin, the African penguin, and the Humboldt penguin.

They mostly inhabit the countries ringing or nearest to Antarctica, as well as the Antarctic continent itself.

Since penguins do not naturally occur within U.S. borders, the effects of such listing would be indirect. These ten penguin species are now among several that have been considered for listing due to threats from climate change.

278 Candidates for the Endangered Species List

An editorial in today's Washington Post reports that the Interior Department has a backlog of candidates for the Endangered Species List. The current administration has approved candidates for listing at a far slower rate than previous administrations. Currently 278 species have been deemed worthy of protection but so far have not been listed.

The Bush administration has made far fewer additions to the endangered species list than its two predecessors. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that President Bush has added 60 species, compared with about 550 by President Bill Clinton and 256 by President George H.W. Bush.

"There are more species in the queue, so to speak, than they have the staff and budget to deal with," said Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery. "It's kind of like doing triage in the emergency room. You have all these species that come into the door, and you have to decide which species have coronaries and which can actually be dealt with later."

If you are curious about which species are considered candidates, you can find a list here. There are eleven species and one subspecies of birds waiting for listing.

• Spotless Crake (American Samoa)
  
• Kauai Creeper ('Akiki)
• Yellow-billed Cuckoo
• Friendly Ground-Dove (American Samoa)
• Greater Sage Grouse
• Horned Lark (strigata subspecies)
• Red Knot
• Kittlitz's Murrelet
• Xantus's Murrelet
• Lesser Prairie-chicken
• Band-rumped Storm-petrel (Hawaii)
• Elfin Woods Warbler (Puerto Rico)
  

In addition, conservation groups have petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list other species not currently on the candidate list, such as the cerulean warbler.

Blogging Note

I will be out of town this week, so blogging will be light. There will not be a "Loose Feathers" post on Friday.

A few things to check out in the meantime:

• Dawn Chorus: Birdblogging - a diary by lineatus at Daily Kos (take the poll!)
• Last week's I and the Bird
• Saturday's Festival of the Trees
  
• Sunday's Carnival of Colors
• Sunday's Circus of the Spineless
  
• Today's Carnival of the Green
  
• Watch for the Tangled Bank on Wednesday at Aardvarchaeology
  

One That Got Away