Piping Plovers are a federally endangered species that call Connecticut’s coast home. What do changes to federal law mean for the bird?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “What could Trump’s changes mean for CT endangered species?” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Jan. Let's start with the Endangered Species Act, which was passed during the Nixon administration in 1973. Could you explain what the law does and how President Trump wants to change it? You've used the situation of the piping plover in Connecticut, for example.
JES: Broadly, it set up a structure for protecting species that were at risk for some sort of difficulty, whether it's a threat to their habitat, or just an overall threat or endangerment that might be visited upon them by development or drilling or, you know, fill in the blank. Over time, they've proven to be one of the biggest factors in terms of threats to wildlife. And I should say parenthetically, we're talking mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, fish, marine mammals, marine fish, and we are talking plants. So we're talking about a lot of things here.
WSHU: So, pretty much what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does, and the National Marine Fisheries Service does, right?
JES: Yes, the National Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries do. They kind of jointly run this, although the National Wildlife Service has most of it. What the Trump administration is endeavoring to do is something that they actually signaled in Project 2025, they were going to do. And as we've seen now, you know, they followed Project 2025 pretty closely. They want to eliminate habitat as part of the definition of what it means to harm a species of any sort. And what has raised all kinds of ire over is, as I indicated, this is what most folks see as the key factor in causing species harm, threatening endangerment, you name it. An example here in Connecticut might be something like the piping plover, which we've all heard about, the small shorebirds that need a certain amount of shoreline that is above the tide line that provides them with the kind of food they need, and people to stay away from them.
WSHU: And what we've been doing is fencing off those areas, right?
JES: Yes, a lot of those areas where they breed have been fenced off. On the coastline, it's been fenced off. But here's the thing: the habitat is still at risk. And the habitat in this particular case is at risk, really, from climate change, which has brought in sea level rise, stronger storms, and it shrunk and shrunk and shrunk that habitat. So, where will these guys go? There isn't enough room. One of the things I could see when I was in an area where they had some of these nests fenced off was that you could see where the high tide line had come through the fencing. Well, sooner or later, as sea levels continue to rise, assuming the world, the U.S., doesn't take any, you know, really definitive action here. It's just going to overrun the habitat. Well, where will these birds go? And that's just, I mean, that's just a single issue of why habitat is important. I mean, going back years and years and years, if you think out west, with the spotted owl fight over logging, and that was going to take away their habitat for nesting and everything else. Almost any species you can think of, habitat really plays a critical role. There are a few exceptions, but habitat is the big one.
WSHU: The Trump administration is drilling down on the word take. It says to take means to capture, kill, or trap. It doesn't mean protecting the habitat. How are they arguing this?
JES: Well, in that list, you listed a few of the words in that list, but the key word is harm, and harm has been not just interpreted, but it's been litigated in the Supreme Court in the past not just to mean kill, but to harm them in other ways, one of which is loss of habitat or degradation of habitat, and that's what they're going after. It's the word harm in particular in that set of items related to the word take.
WSHU: Okay, so if there are environmental changes because of the Trump administration policies. Is there anything the state can do? What do we have as state protections for endangered species in Connecticut?
JES: Connecticut, along with other states, but by no means lots of states, has its own Endangered Species Act in place. Whatever the Trump administration does, it'll have a tangential impact on what Connecticut decides to do, but it'll have some impact, and the state will not have to change its own laws. Our Endangered Species Act lists gobs and gobs of species that it considers endangered, and a rung down threatened, or another rung down species of concern, and there are state regulations in place. Some shoreline towns, in particular, have some local zoning rules and other kinds of rules in place. But where you run into trouble is when you have species that sort of run in interstate ways. An example I was given is something called a Bog Turtle, which New York also has. Well, it's on the federal list. It's also on the state list. But if New York does something that would impact what happens in Connecticut, we as Connecticut would not really have the ability to say, 'Hey, New York, stop doing that.' But the Feds would.
WSHU: The environment doesn't respect state boundaries, the ecosystem and the larger ecosystem?
JES: Yeah, no. I mean, we're all in ecosystems, and they interact in many different ways, and the habitat is one. Suppose the habitat is degraded to a point that whatever species is there can't live there. Well, if you're a freshwater fish or in a muscle that is in Connecticut, well, how do you move? It's fresh water. Now, if you're a marine mammal, you can move to cooler waters. If you're a bird, you can move. But you know, the vegetation that you eat, or the species in the water that you may eat, or the insects that it may eat, will they move in time? These things have to sync up. I should also say we have an example here in Connecticut and throughout a lot of the northeast, you know, one type of animal that is definitely endangered that doesn't have to do with habitat. Those are bats, any number of types of bats. The State of Connecticut, on its list, has a whole mess of them. The feds for our area have two. They suffer from a disease, something called White Nose Syndrome. They got plenty of habitat, but we have this disease that we haven't figured out a way to get rid of yet.
WSHU: The state of Connecticut wants some more species added to the federal list. What's happening with that?
JES: The big one here is something called a salt marsh Sparrow. Again, this is habitat-related, not unlike the piping plover, which nests way down in the salt marsh. The piping plover nests are slightly higher, but the Marsh sparrows nest way down in the salt marsh. And if we're having even a full moon, high tide or increased sea levels or a bad storm, those nests can wash out very easily and the Center for Biological Diversity actually petitioned the federal government some time ago to add that to the federal list. They were told by a different administration that fish and wildlife was going to add it. It never happened. The Center for Biological Diversity said to me that they really don't think the Trump administration will do anything about it unless the center takes the administration to court.
WSHU: Bottom line is that Connecticut officials are trying to get local communities more involved. Could you just tell us a little bit about that? And is that an anecdote to what could possibly change on the federal level?
JES: It can certainly help. What the Audubon Connecticut has done, using its its own foundation money the past couple of summers, is coordinate with Stratford and West Haven to help train local officials on how to understand what's going on with the shorebirds and be cognizant of that if you know they notice something untoward at the beach, it builds on a lot of regulations that shoreline towns already have, really to protect people and the beaches themselves. Don't bring dogs on the beach, don't make fires on the beach, no ATVs on the beach, but Audubon Connecticut points out that these regulations, while they're good for people, also happen to be good for some of the wildlife. But police officers, for instance, who monitor this stuff may be, you know, completely uninformed of the regulations that are on the books and the issue of endangered species on the beaches. So if they see a fire on the beach, they would now know, not only do I deal with the people who set the fire, but let me go check for the birds, because it's nesting season.
