Seeking More Cooperation and Less Regulation

The Safe Harbor program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) aims to get private landowners to voluntarily help protect endangered species. Enrolled landowners agree to create or maintain habitat suitable for certain endangered species. In turn, the government agrees that, even if the listed species takes up residence on enrolled land, the landowner will still have the freedom to convert that land to some other use. Safe Harbor is expected to bring about a net increase inboth the population and habitat of the targeted endangered species, even if some of the new habitat is eventually converted to another use.

Before Safe Harbor, the laws designed to protect endangered species actually caused private landowners to avoid attracting these rare plants and animals to live on their lands. Landowners believed that once you have listed species living on your property, you can face severe restrictions on future timber harvests, conversion to agriculture, or real estate developments on that land. Since 1982, when "incidental takings" provisions were added to the Endangered Species Act, some private landowners have legally altered habitat where listed species lived, but only after a very difficult permitting process.

One of the most prominent endangered species in the southeast, the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker (RCW), requires a stand of mature longleaf pine with practically no trees and shrubs in the understory and midstory. Until now, owners of mature longleaf stands might have felt the need to "cut the timber before the bird gets here" to preserve long-term land use options.

Property owners in the sandhills region of North Carolina have enrolled 17,500 acres of potential RCW habitat in the Safe Harbor program. They have agreed in writing to clear understory hardwoods and take other measures to make or keep their longleaf stands attractive to the RCW. If RCWs come to live on those lands, the owner is still free--subject to the normal land use regulations that apply in that area--to alter that habitat, as long as the FWS is first given a chance to relocate the RCWs. The RCW population on private land in that part of North Carolina has been steadily declining. Now, with the voluntary cooperation of private landowners brought about by Safe Harbor, it is expected to increase.

Our source of information (the May/June 1996 issue of "Common Ground", a newsletter of the Conservation Fund) is unclear about whether landowners who already have endangered species on their lands can benefit from Safe Harbor. As far as we know, Safe Harbor is not yet working with private landowners in Florida. For more information about this promising program, contact the FWS or a Florida wildlife biologist.